Tag: MX3D

ThingsCon 2018 workshop ‘Seeing Like a Bridge’

Workshop in progress with a view of Rotterdam’s Willemsbrug across the Maas.

Early December of last year Alec Shuldiner and myself ran a workshop at ThingsCon 2018 in Rotterdam.

Here’s the description as it was listed on the conference website:

In this workshop we will take a deep dive into some of the challenges of designing smart public infrastructure.

Smart city ideas are moving from hype into reality. The everyday things that our contemporary world runs on, such as roads, railways and canals are not immune to this development. Basic, “hard” infrastructure is being augmented with internet-connected sensing, processing and actuating capabilities. We are involved as practitioners and researchers in one such project: the MX3D smart bridge, a pedestrian bridge 3D printed from stainless steel and equipped with a network of sensors.

The question facing everyone involved with these developments, from citizens to professionals to policy makers is how to reap the potential benefits of these technologies, without degrading the urban fabric. For this to happen, information technology needs to become more like the city: open-ended, flexible and adaptable. And we need methods and tools for the diverse range of stakeholders to come together and collaborate on the design of truly intelligent public infrastructure.

We will explore these questions in this workshop by first walking you through the architecture of the MX3D smart bridge—offering a uniquely concrete and pragmatic view into a cutting edge smart city project. Subsequently we will together explore the question: What should a smart pedestrian bridge that is aware of itself and its surroundings be able to tell us? We will conclude by sharing some of the highlights from our conversation, and make note of particularly thorny questions that require further work.

The workshop’s structure was quite simple. After a round of introductions, Alec introduced the MX3D bridge to the participants. For a sense of what that introduction talk was like, I recommend viewing this recording of a presentation he delivered at a recent Pakhuis de Zwijger event.

We then ran three rounds of group discussion in the style of world cafe. each discussion was guided by one question. Participants were asked to write, draw and doodle on the large sheets of paper covering each table. At the end of each round, people moved to another table while one person remained to share the preceding round’s discussion with the new group.

The discussion questions were inspired by value-sensitive design. I was interested to see if people could come up with alternative uses for a sensor-equipped 3D-printed footbridge if they first considered what in their opinion made a city worth living in.

The questions we used were:

  1. What specific things do you like about your town? (Places, things to do, etc. Be specific.)
  2. What values underly those things? (A value is what a person or group of people consider important in life.)
  3. How would you redesign the bridge to support those values?

At the end of the three discussion rounds we went around to each table and shared the highlights of what was produced. We then had a bit of a back and forth about the outcomes and the workshop approach, after which we wrapped up.

We did get to some interesting values by starting from personal experience. Participants came from a variety of countries and that was reflected in the range of examples and related values. The design ideas for the bridge remained somewhat abstract. It turned out to be quite a challenge to make the jump from values to different types of smart bridges. Despite this, we did get nice ideas such as having the bridge report on water quality of the canal it crosses, derived from the value of care for the environment.

The response from participants afterwards was positive. People found it thought-provoking, which was definitely the point. People were also eager to learn even more about the bridge project. It remains a thing that captures people’s imagination. For that reason alone, it continues to be a very productive case to use for the grounding of these sorts of discussions.

PhD update – January 2019

Thought I’d post a quick update on my PhD. Since my previous post almost five months have passed. I’ve been developing my plan further, for which you’ll find an updated description below. I’ve also put together my very first conference paper, co-authored with my supervisor Gerd Kortuem. It’s a case study of the MX3D smart bridge for Designing Interactive Systems 2019. We’ll see if it gets accepted. But in any case, writing something has been hugely educational. And once I finally figured out what the hell I was doing, it was sort of fun as well. Still kind of a trip to be paid to do this kind of work. Looking ahead, I am setting goals for this year and the nearer term as well. It’s all very rough still but it will likely involve research through design as a method and maybe object oriented ontology as a theory. All of which will serve to operationalise and evaluate the usefulness of the “contestability” concept in the context of smart city infrastructure. To be continued—and I welcome all your thoughts!

Designing Smart City Infrastructure for Contestability

The use of information technology in cities increasingly subjects citizens to automated data collection, algorithmic decision making and remote control of physical space. Citizens tend to find these systems and their outcomes hard to understand and predict [1]. Moreover, the opacity of smart urban systems precludes full citizenship and obstructs people’s ‘right to the city’ [2].

A commonly proposed solution is to improve citizens understanding of systems by making them more open and transparent [3]. For example, GDPR prescribes people’s right to explanation of automated decisions they have been subjected to. For another example, the city of Amsterdam offers a publicly accessible register of urban sensors, and is committed to opening up all the data they collect.

However, it is not clear that openness and transparency in and of itself will yield the desired improvements in understanding and governing of smart city infrastructures [4]. We would like to suggest that for a system to perceived as accountable, people must be able to contest its workings—from the data it collects, to the decisions it makes, all the way through to how those decisions are acted on in the world.

The leading research question for this PhD therefore is how to design smart city infrastructure—urban systems augmented with internet-connected sensing, processing and actuating capabilities—for contestability [5]: the extent to which a system supports the ability of those subjected to it to oppose its workings as wrong or mistaken.

References

  1. Burrell, Jenna. “How the machine ‘thinks’: Understanding opacity in machine learning algorithms.” Big Data & Society 3.1 (2016): 2053951715622512.
  2. Kitchin, Rob, Paolo Cardullo, and Cesare Di Feliciantonio. “Citizenship, Justice and the Right to the Smart City.” (2018).
  3. Abdul, Ashraf, et al. “Trends and trajectories for explainable, accountable and intelligible systems: An hci research agenda.” Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2018.
  4. Ananny, Mike, and Kate Crawford. “Seeing without knowing: Limitations of the transparency ideal and its application to algorithmic accountability.” New Media & Society 20.3 (2018): 973-989.
  5. Hirsch, Tad, et al. “Designing contestability: Interaction design, machine learning, and mental health.” Proceedings of the 2017 Conference on Designing Interactive Systems. ACM, 2017.

Starting a PhD

Today is the first official work day of my new doctoral researcher position at Delft University of Technology. After more than two years of laying the ground work, I’m starting out on a new challenge.

I remember sitting outside a Jewel coffee bar in Singapore1 and going over the various options for whatever would be next after shutting down Hubbub. I knew I wanted to delve into the impact of machine learning and data science on interaction design. And largely through process of elimination I felt the best place for me to do so would be inside of academia.

Back in the Netherlands, with help from Ianus Keller, I started making inroads at TU Delft, my first choice for this kind of work. I had visited it on and off over the years, coaching students and doing guest lectures. I’d felt at home right away.

There were quite a few twists and turns along the way but now here we are. Starting this month I am a doctoral candidate at Delft University of Technology’s faculty of Industrial Design Engineering.

My research is provisionally titled ‘Intelligibility and Transparency of Smart Public Infrastructures: A Design Oriented Approach’. Its main object of study is the MX3D smart bridge. My supervisors are Gerd Kortuem and Neelke Doorn. And it’s all part of the NWO-funded project ‘BRIdging Data in the built Environment (BRIDE)’.

Below is a first rough abstract of the research. But in the months to come this is likely to change substantially as I start hammering out a proper research plan. I plan to post the occasional update on my work here, so if you’re interested your best bet is probably to do the old RSS thing. There’s social media too, of course. And I might set up a newsletter at some point. We’ll see.

If any of this resonates, do get in touch. I’d love to start a conversation with as many people as possible about this stuff.

Intelligibility and Transparency of Smart Public Infrastructures: A Design Oriented Approach

This phd will explore how designers, technologists, and citizens can utilize rapid urban manufacturing and IoT technologies for designing urban space that expresses its intelligence from the intersection of people, places, activities and technology, not merely from the presence of cutting-edge technology. The key question is how smart public infrastructure, i.e. data-driven and algorithm-rich public infrastructures, can be understood by lay-people.

The design-oriented research will utilize a ‘research through design’ approach to develop a digital experience around the bridge and the surrounding urban space. During this extended design and making process the phd student will conduct empirical research to investigate design choices and their implications on (1) new forms of participatory data-informed design processes, (2) the technology-mediated experience of urban space, (3) the emerging relationship between residents and “their” bridge, and (4) new forms of data-informed, citizen led governance of public space.

  1. My Foursquare history and 750 Words archive tell me this was on Saturday, January 16, 2016. [↩]