Angela —
What are your reflections on the concept of openness (e.g., open data, open science, etc.) as it relates to design and innovative technologies? 

Bryan —
The question of openness is a question of values. As we developed our degree in urban technology, we held openness as a ‘personal’ value and a core belief. We strongly believe in doing things in the open and making the design world more accessible to everyone, not just select individuals. Openness is an ethos that underpins our program.

But I also see another facet of openness. In the United States, open data is usually described in contrast to closed data, something that is privately held. The contrast between open and closed data lies in the data's transparency and in the fact that closed data accrues economic value solely to the holder of that resource. On the other hand, open data creates the possibility for anyone to create something meaningful on top of it. 

So, when working in this area, I think the questions you have to ask yourself are: Do I value the commons? Do I have a sense of the worth of public value?

Cedric Price: Diagram mapping programme and community for Inter-Action Centre, London, England, 1977. Cedric Price fonds, Collection Centre Canadien d'Architecture/Canadian Centre for Architecture, Montréal. Copyright: CCA

Angela —
This makes me think of social media, and the new ways we create open communities today. How do you think we should create an open community online? 

Bryan —
My overall advice is to share what you are doing in the most genuine way that you can and make it easy to find. I think sometimes, particularly when we're talking about things like open data, citizen science, strategic design, or the future of the design profession, we can get lost a little bit in all of the multi-syllabic words and high-level jargon. At the end of the day, you need to make it easy for people to enter that conversation. 

Creating online communities is important to me. When I was in high school, I spent every minute that I could on online discussion groups. It was an incredibly powerful community. I was part of a relatively small group of people who were building websites by hand, publishing on whatever they saw or whatever articles they had read. It was very genuine, very open, very honest. 

One of the first online communities, SF NET Coffee House Network, San Francisco. Screenshots from a CNN report, 1991. Collage by GV.

I think that experience set the tone for how I approach community building online. When we started the degree program here, we also started a newsletter, and we just wrote very simply, week by week, about what we were doing, what we were thinking about, and what we were interested in. It created a reference point for other people to gravitate towards. 

So, to start, just put your hand up and declare: “This is what we believe in, and this is what we are doing.“ Go from there. Be unafraid to be yourself and try to make sure that everything that you do exhibits or exudes your values and interests. In that sense, creating a community is a design project. All the details matter.

Angela —
You have a design office and a background in architecture. What are your thoughts about architecture and the skill or techniques of design. Why is design important?

Bryan —
In my research at Helsinki Design Lab, I had the privilege of travelling around the world and learning from individuals who worked in strategic design capacities. These individuals were involved in shaping or reshaping the political or economic context in a concrete way. For instance, during our visit to Chile to study the ELEMENTAL housing projects and their approach to social housing, we met with the housing minister, who happened to be a former architect. This was not a unique occurrence, as we repeatedly encountered people in leadership positions from policy or business backgrounds who had a background in architecture. 

One of the questions we asked was: What do students gain from an architecture school that is so powerful? After much consideration, my colleagues and I concluded that architecture school is an excellent way to comprehend systems while still maintaining a connection to humanity.

I see design as a form of agency, as a tool set, as a form of know-how that can be really powerful for the work that students might do as a policymaker or a businessperson. For example, a designer of a toaster, or a building, or a website, or a new service, is going to approach that with some understanding of the quantifiable facts. Designers also understand that some things are completely ineffable—the cultural meaning, for instance. In between those two poles, designers also consider disciplinary knowledge codified into rules of thumb. A good designer can bring all of that together, synthesize it, and come up with a plan of action. Concrete output forged from a plurality of know-how is the ‘nugget’ of what designers do. Designers do not have a monopoly on creativity, or empathy, or brainstorming, but they do have a powerful skill set to navigate unlike forms of evidence to make concrete outputs.

More Than One Data Point, screenshot of the People Party, a design tool that visualizes U.S. Census data and inviting architects to imagine more inclusive, demographically attuned spaces. Developed by Bryan Boyer, Urban Technology Lab, 2021.

People Party uses U.S. Census data to approximate racial representation by assigning customizable skin and hair colors based on location. It draws on 2019 survey data from U.S. cities over 65,000 people.

Angela —
Where does the end user fit when talking about design, technology, and data?

Bryan —
I have a bit of a personal response to this. I started college in a completely different subject, then dropped out, and started a tech company and worked in Silicon Valley. After that, I went back to school to finish my undergraduate degree, and I switched majors to architecture in an art school. I remember my first day as an architecture student. The professor asked us to go out and collect a bunch of trash and use it to make a model of a pavilion. It was a perfectly reasonable Architecture 101 assignment, but the whole time I was thinking: “Why aren't we talking to any people?” 

This was thanks to my background in digital interaction design, which has a specific lineage, where research played a critical role in the process. We looked at past examples and asked users about their tasks and how they connected to the solutions. In contrast, architectural education more often starts with autonomous, disciplinary questions. 

Designers sometimes have a limited understanding of the many different users in a process. So, for example, if you're talking about government service, like a housing benefit, usually researchers or consultants will do ethnography around the Government service that they are redesigning. They will talk about the citizens who are recipients of that service, but there are also the people who are administering that program. Their experience is also a big part of the success of it. We have to understand their lived experience as well. The people who enable the system or are a part of it should be considered as much as those who are the recipients. 

We should also consider those outside of the system. I think architects have a ton to contribute to our understanding of how systems work, but the discipline of architecture does not have the most sophisticated tools to understand people and human experiences. With our urban tech program being housed in a school of architecture and planning, we have an opportunity to connect the systemic to the human.

Angela —
As an educator, what are some of the things that you think designers can get better at so they can be a part of this new approach to technology, data and society?

Bryan —
I often hear students make gross generalizations about people or communities. They know that they have to talk to people, but they don’t have a sense of how you write an interview protocol, a process to synthesize what they learned, or an understanding of sample size. They don't really know how to make sure they talk to enough people with enough diversity. 

I think this links back to the discussion on design thinking and the focus on end users. In architecture schools, there has typically been very little engagement with that whole discussion over the past decade. In my experience, they are not teaching it or debating it. Whereas almost every other design school, (for example industrial design or graphic design), the discipline and education have undergone huge transformations. They have had soul searching arguments and debates. They have been trying to make sense of what design thinking is, and what it means for their education, yet in architecture we are only just starting that conversation. Again, I’m not the biggest fan of design thinking per se, but it’s also wild that it has had such a transformative impact on design but almost none on architecture.