Architecture, Technology, and the Future of Cities

A Welcome to Practice Disrupted, a podcast where we find ways to create new solutions to current challenges while elevating the value of architects. I'm your host, Evelyn Lee, an architect who spans tech as an angel investor, startup advisor, and founder of Practice of Architecture. Whether you're a seasoned architect or just starting in the field, this podcast is your gateway to think differently about the role architects play within our global community. Hello, disruptors. Welcome back to this week's episode of Practice Disrupted. Today we're exploring the space where the built environment meets technology with my guest, Brian Boyer. Brian is the co founder of Dash Marshall, an architecture and strategic design studio, and he serves as faculty director of the Urban Technology program at the University of Michigan. His work and writing focus on how data, code, and automation are reshaping the way we design, build, and govern our cities.

A Through his leadership at Michigan, Brian is helping train the next generation of designers who will be equally fluent in architecture, planning and technology, preparing them to take on roles in entrepreneurship, policymaking, and practice. His concept of urban technology challenges us to see cities as both physical and digital systems and to rethink how architects can stay relevant in a rapidly digitizing world. We'll talk about the origins of this program, what makes it unique, and why architects need to think differently about risk, innovation, and the fragmentation of the industry if we want to design for a better future.

B Hello, Brian. Welcome to the show. So happy to have you on Practice Disrupted.

C Hi. Yeah, thank you so much. I'm really happy to be here with a chainsaw in the background.

B Well, now our listeners at least know what that buzzing is. Before we get into it, can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you ended up on maybe the academic side of things?

C Sure. My background is I started college and dropped out almost immediately to go work in tech in what I think of as like Web 1.0 era. So this was in the early, early 2000s, and then at some point decided that I wanted to do the work of all the coolest people around me working on the web at that point. And they were all like architect refugees who had studied architecture and then gone into the web. So I went to study architecture. And so fast forward to today, and my work is kind of a blend of urban technology, kind of helping people think about how technology affects the built environment and plan for that, and then straight up architecture. And so for the past five years, I've been at Taubman College at the University of Michigan as the faculty director of a new Bachelor of Science in Urban Technology that we created.

B Yeah, So I think a lot of people will be hearing this term urban technology for the first time. And I know you just kind of alluded to what that is. Can you expand upon that definition a little bit more?

C Yeah. So, you know, one of the easy maybe buzzwords to think about in this context is smart cities, which has kind of been bouncing around for a long time. But I think even that is pretty useless. Like, what actually does smart cities mean? So for me, and the way that we think about it in the degree program, it's actually really foundational. It's what happens when data, code and automation get applied to the stuff that architects, engineers, planners, real estate professionals, and the people that operate the built environment do all day, every day. So, you know, in that sense is it's really responding to the kind of slow and ongoing digitization of our work as people who focus on the built environment. If you think about publishing media like music and film, you think about basic productivity and business stuff. Like so many, many different industries, essentially all industries have become digitized over the past few decades.

C And yet the built environment comparatively is relatively not. And so that's kind of still a lot of work to be done in this sector in terms of modernizing the way that we use software and hardware to do our work differently and hopefully be more productive.

B What is your personal take on why we are so slow?

C Well, I think one of the issues is that the work of, you know, I'll just focus on architecture because that's the world that I know best. The work of architecture is obviously a very broad spectrum of different types of practices and interests. But a lot of firms think of themselves as doing very innovative work. They're not trying to build the same building over and over again. And yet the structure of the business, the way that we are compensated, for instance, the way that we're contracted, doesn't recognize that innovation work at all. And so there's actually like, there's. There's not much fat in our businesses. There's not much money to use, to experiment, to invest in new technologies.

C It makes firm owners very cautious about that because it could be the difference between being stable or not. Right. And so that's a very different financial profile and therefore risk profile from say, a tech company, which, if you have venture funding, the whole point is to use that pile of money to take some risks that are informed and reasoned, that hopefully they pay off in a big way. So I think that's one piece of it. I think the other piece is more. Well, I guess it's kind of equally systemic, which is the way that American architects have been advised since, I struggle to remember Proprac, but since the middle of last century was basically to move away from means and methods methods and to move toward a smaller and smaller scope and essentially shedding risk because of that. But what it means is that our work on the design and formulation of the built environment is horizontally disaggregated. The architect works with the engineer, the engineer works with a construction manager.

C They both work with a construction manager. There's a bunch of subcontracts underneath that, yada, yada, yada. And so that in aggregate, the team that it takes to produce a new building or a new public space is extremely fragmented horizontally. And that produces a situation that I think of as chain drain. As in the intelligence is draining out of the supply chain at every single link that's there. And so again, if I think about that in comparison to the experiences that I've had in the tech industry, a company like Google or Salesforce for that matter, is effectively vertically integrated. You control all aspects of the product that you produce and therefore you also benefit from any efficiencies that you can find within that process. But really importantly, you get the feedback of your users and you can integrate it into the next iteration of the product.

C That loop, that feedback loop doesn't exist because of the broken supply chain that we have in the built environment. Or it's, it's, it's more costly to acquire. Let's think of it that way.

B Is it more costly to acquire? But though, but I think it's, I mean, for me, and I don't want to digress from our initial conversation though, it also goes a little bit back to scalability. Right. And the fact that everything that we build is we, you know, a prototype in and of itself. And I think that we don't necessarily value that in the same way where like an engineer who is usually paid much more coming out of school than an architecture person, but like if they do one thing in a vertically integrated product that scales to multiple millions of people, the value of that one thing, albeit much smaller than the many things that they could be contributing as like a new architecture grad is also much larger.

C Right.

B Were you at Taubman before the Urban Tech program was created? Tell us a little bit about how the Urban Tech program came to be.

C Yeah, so I started at Taubman as a visiting professor in 2019 and 2020, that academic year. So it was a really exciting moment, is when the entire world and education system went through a Radical shift. And so during that time, I started talking with the Dean about this idea for an urban tech degree that. That he had been germinating for a while. And so it was that one of.

B Your interests in going there as a. Just like even visiting faculty.

C Well, so that I taught a thesis studio with architecture students. And the premise of the studio was the building is not enough. Let's think about a building as part of a larger system of interventions. And so we're really like taking service design methodologies, just thinking about how organizations work and how programs work, these like, intangibles, and getting architects to be explicit about that. And so there was a kind of natural connection then to like, essentially thinking about what can you do if you retain the systems perspective of architectural thinking and the like telescoping scales of architectural thinking and the concern for the built environment that comes from architecture, but maybe fixate less on the building as the vehicle of change, the thing that will affect change in the world. And that comes from a pretty simple starting point, which is if you want to increase health or decrease hunger or increase economic productivity of a community, usually building a building is one of the slowest ways to do that. And so if we find people that are truly passionate about these things, like many of our students are at Taubman, it's I think, a good idea to give them other tools, other forms of agency, help them find other forms of agency that they can practice in the world, be it entrepreneurship or policymaking or otherwise.

B A lot of our listeners, I think, have like an architecture degree, Right. So they've gone, whether it's a Bachelor of Art in Architecture or Bachelor in Science or B arc or M arch or what have you, I think we are blessed with the knowledge of what it means to come through that. So how does the curriculum for the urban tech degree differ from kind of my typical architecture degree?

C Yeah, So I also have two degrees in architecture. So I know it inside and out. And it was, you know, one of the hopes of the curriculum writing process, which was, you know, I was very involved. We'd also worked with faculty across the college. So it was by no means just me. But, you know, it's like when one creates a new academic offering, I think is there is a risk that it becomes kind of processing of all of the, like, the failures of your own education. Right. And so forgive me if that is part of this, but we tried.

C Try not to make that the fixation. So for our curriculum in urban technology, it's cities, technology and design. And so there are Required courses in each of those. The city's set of courses is really focused on helping students understand cities as systems, both physically, things like land use and zoning and utility networks and parks and public spaces, urban design, et cetera, as well as the decision making systems that produce those things. So what are the institutions? Who are the stakeholders? What are the different forms of power that are being exercised within that matrix? And the point of all of that is to give our students really sharp eyes so that, you know, sometimes I describe it to them as, when you leave here, if you find yourself 10 years from now sitting in traffic somewhere, frustrated, I want you to be able to hypothesize what's not working, why traffic is there, other than like they're just dumb drivers. Or if you find yourself teleported to the market square of a city in a place you've never been to before and you have no reference, I want you to be able to use your understanding of how cities have worked throughout history and your observational skills to start making some sense of the world around you. And so it's really about getting to the root of the experience and therefore the, the potential challenges, right, that might become things that you could latch onto as an avid problem solver or proactive person in the world. So that's the cities bucket.

C The technology bucket is go learn how to code, go learn how to do data science, learn what an API is, learn what a database is, and just get past the point that you're afraid of that stuff or that you say, oh, it's too complicated. Just it does some stuff over there and it's magical. And so the point there is that in the built environment, there's not enough technical comfort is my feeling. You know, it's been a minute since I myself was in school and since I've taught architecture students, but I still see, you know, pretty like people are using computers all day long and often even are like relatively tech comfortable. But it kind of plateaus at using software, not thinking about where the rough edges are, or the fact that actually a lot of the software that we use in the built environment professions I would describe as actually we put up with, it's pretty shitty software often. And there's lots of opportunity to not just do things like, you know, make an efficient panelization module in Grasshopper, but also just improve your workflow and reduce the amount of work that you're repeating, the number of, you know, buttons you're clicking to do something.

B And a lot of technological debt, I think.

C Yeah, exactly.

B A lot of Technological debt. And I think like, I don't know anyone or any firm, firm wide who is optimizing for the full use of what even just comes out of box in any software program.

C So yeah, so, so that it's a little bit of a digression. But the technical piece is like, don't be afraid of technology and don't be bamboozled by it. Like have as much as we can, have clear eyes about what the capabilities are, what's reasonable. And the point of that is to position you later to say, like, I think we can build a technical system that does this. We don't need to rely on people clicking the damn button over and over again. We can automate it and to do that with some basis of reality. And so then the third piece of the curriculum is design. And this is the one that takes kind of the most, I think, effort to describe with a conversation like this.

C Because it's not architectural design, it's not spatial design, it's not urban design. We are focused on interaction design and service design and then what we call strategic design. And so, you know, if we think about training people to create digital systems that reshape the architecture, engineering and construction world or everyday life on the sidewalk, then that means that's going to largely live in screen based interfaces that cause stuff to happen. And so we need to be really proficient in designing screen based interfaces, doing UI UX work. But the built environment is unique in that almost nothing that actually changes the built environment is completely on the screen. So you know, one of our colleagues at the university in engineering, Bronco, runs a company that does Internet connected stormwater drains, right? It's like, no offense to Branko, it's like so boring, but so essential, so important. Like I would have, before I visited his lab, I would have never thought that I could get excited about a stormwater drain. But then I go to see it and he's like, yeah.

C So now the person in a small town in Michigan or Indiana or wherever that is responsible for not getting the town flooded doesn't have to wake up in the middle of the storm and go to the stormwater drain and pull like literally like pull a thing out and measure it and then push another rod to open the gate or whatever it is. We can do that from home and without all the risk, personal risk that's involved. But we can also, because that is the monitoring of that system of stormwater is now producing a data stream. Then we're set up to do things like be predictive about it and so it's a good example, I think, of the kind of humility that we're trying to bring to Urban Tech and the popping of the bubble of the hype around it. Because at the end of the day, there are just these very straightforward places where things can be better and more contemporary simply in the way that we're familiar with from other aspects of say, our consumer life. And so it's a long way to say that the design is really focused on digital technology and then the kind of like organizational or like process based design that goes with that. And that's what's wrapped up in service and strategy for us.

B So it's a very unique program. Right. I think there's people that go into technology and kind of find their way to this space. There's people that come in from architecture. It's an entirely new program that doesn't exist anywhere else. So where did you find your first cohort of students?

C Yes. So there's only one other program in the world that we know of that is called Urban Technology and that's at Cornell Tech in New York City. It's a master's program. So there are, I think we share a lot with other programs that might focus on say, innovation or design thinking or urban analytics. Often those also exist at the grad level. So it is somewhat unique at the undergraduate level. And then the emphasis that we put on design as kind of the form of agency, the thing you're going to do afterwards is like, I'm going to make a thing that's unique. And so the way that I think about it now, and honestly, if you asked me six months ago, it would have been different because it's continually evolving, is that as an undergraduate program it's really meant to be a kind of liberal arts for the urban era.

C And the intention there is that if you come study with us, you'll have this broad set of perspectives and you'll have some technical and some design skills. And you may then go on and be a really great student in an M Arch program and an architect. But you will have a broader base to do that from. Same thing if you pursue planning. But I think we will also see that our students go toward entrepreneurship or toward political positions, and that's by design. We want it to be a diverse cohort because we think that the kind of like the learning through osmosis of different perspectives that show up in the classroom when it's not attached to a very particular identity of architect is important. This was the big gamble, right? It was like we knew that our graduates were doing things like going to do UI UX work or going to work in game design, all these other many, many, many fields. Right.

C And so we knew that, that it was possible, but we didn't know that people would ask for it at the stage of you're a high school student applying to college.

B Applying.

C Yeah, yeah. And so what I have found is actually most high school students don't really know the difference between architecture and planning and that like, we're kind of lost a little bit maybe too in the precision of our different fields. And so the students that come to us, many of them said, say something along the lines of, I was really excited about computer science and I was really excited about urban planning. And I thought I had to choose. And I saw both of those as majors at the university. And then I got to the bottom and there was urban technology and I realized I could do both. So it's a self selecting bunch, which I think is frankly exciting because there are people who are self selecting, self identifying with something that is new and we make no bones about it being new. We tell people constantly, I tell people, as the faculty director, you are part of creating this and the interests that you have that you bring here are going to shape what this degree means for the people that come after you.

C And I think that beyond the content, that's also an important piece of what we're trying to cultivate because it means the students are, they have a healthy appreciation for the unknown and that they're embracing that in a way that I think is really positive. And we want that kind of attitude as part of the program.

B So the self selection and also kind of through the self discovery process, does that mean that most of your cohort was local to the Michigan area or they knew they wanted to be a part part of Michigan. Where did you find your first cohort?

C So the first cohort and basically all the cohorts behind them, it's about a third from Michigan, a third from elsewhere in the US And a third internationally. So as you might expect, for a university like ours, there's a number of students that come from New York and San Francisco, Louisiana, San Francisco, Chicago, like major cities, obviously. And as much as I would like to take credit for having this amazing curriculum that attracted students out of the ether, the reality is the university does the work. And of the people that want to come to the university, some of them find what we're doing and say, this is great. And then there is a very small and slowly growing contingent of people who find us because of the writing and talking and the student work that they see and all of that that we're putting out into the world and really trying to. Since the start, before we even had students. The approach that I took with publicizing this and talking about it was let's have a conversation. I'm not going to sell you something because it doesn't exist.

C So it's just not a very good product to sell. It's vaporware. But if we have a conversation, we can turn that conversation into something that's more structured, called a class. And we can turn those classes into something called a degree. And we can turn that degree and those people into a culture. And so that's the journey that we're on in terms of how we kind of fold people into the process of what we're working on.

B When did you remind me and our listeners when your first cohort graduated?

C The spring. The spring? Yeah, just a few months ago.

B How big was it? And then ultimately, where have you seen some of them land? And I realize it's not the most wonderful job market right now either in saying that, but.

C Yeah, yeah, yes. The job market is not ideal for especially early grads. So the total cohort was about 20 students. And the types of places they've gone are actually skew more heavily towards traditional built environment than I was expecting. So we have people who are at transportation consulting firms like FAIR and peers. We have people at real estate development firms, renewable energy development firms. We have people who are somebody's doing like a internship at Sasaki and their urban technology practice. That's like a great fit, obviously.

C And so, you know, I think I kind of think of the career trajectories as two different buckets. There's the people that go to the built environment and what they bring there is a set of skills and know how that is not common from other architects and planners and real estate professionals. So things like user research, user experience, design, like that's actually really useful if you're in real estate. It's trying to understand your customers. So that is like adding new muscle to the existing built environment businesses. And then the other side of it, like we had a student this summer who is a product management intern at Microsoft. And so in a context like that, they're bringing some domain understanding. Their peers are likely to be people who come from a computer science or information science background.

C But if they're doing something that actually works with cities as the client, for instance, or addresses the built environment in some way, our students bring a Level of domain, I won't say expertise, but domain understanding, that's less common.

B And I think all of the enterprise software people, Salesforce included, have like their own vertical chasing after government, government agencies. So that's really interesting. We alluded earlier to the dynamics between the scale and speed with which tech works and the scale and speed with which the built environment works. How do you balance that divide within this program and make sure that your graduates kind of have the patience to deal with the built environment while they're working at the speed of tech?

C So it starts with just being explicit about it. And so, for instance, I'm going to go on a little bit of a tangent. I'll come back. But, you know, we have this question of where the students are going to where they want to work and where they might intern before that. And so even at the level of how do you get an internship at Microsoft vs. An AEC firm? Completely different cycles, expectations.

B Yeah. Completely different approaches. One a lot more structured than the other. So.

C Yeah, yeah, yeah. And so first of all, we just start by naming things and so describing, like, we produce this, we call it the Careers Primer, which is basically a bunch of slides that you can read to make sense of that wild world out there. But one of the things that it does is say, this is how an AAC firm works. It almost 99.9% is a professional services firm, and this is how it functions. And these are kind of the basics. And this is a tech company. It is 99.9% a product firm that sells products. And here's what those expectations are, and here's what the teams inside of it are.

C And so just helping people understand so that they can see both and speak to both eventually is important. Then, you know, in terms of, like, what do you do about that divide? I think that's like, that's not for me to answer. That's for all of the people who come through this program to answer over their lifetime, as much as I wish we had an answer right now. But it, I guess kind of comes from a similar place of like, starting with being really explicit about the fact that there are differences. So, for instance, all the students take a course called Change Making in Cities. And that course is designed as a survey of different types of power that play out in cities. And so last semester when they did it, they studied Uber and Lyft's move into Austin, Texas, which, I don't know if everybody follows this so closely, but basically Austin years ago said, we're going to kick you out unless you improve your driver screening process and the ride hail companies called Austin's bluff and said, forget it, we're not going to do this. And so it's an example of the kind of unusual contest between a tech company and a government.

C And in this case the state government came in and preempted Austin. So now you two levels of government and a private company. Right, like very different forms of power than say play out in a real estate transaction. And so we want our students to be aware of those dynamics so that they can both critique them and also potentially use them hopefully in a considerate way. And you can only do that if you like, kind of see it in a clear eyed manner. And so that's where it starts for us. And maybe just to share a last part of that, when I worked at Sidewalk Labs, which is Google smart cities company that's now defunct, and worked very closely with Dan Doctorov, the CEO, and Josh Seyrefman is the number two. And Dan used to say, we are bridging the gap between the urbanists and the technologist.

C That's the work of Sidewalk Labs. And the way that I think about it is that our degree program, the goal is to create a generation of students and professionals that don't believe that that gap exists because it doesn't. That's how old silos of expertise have organized the world. But our actual experience of the city is fully physical and fully digital in 2025. It's just, it's, that's the reality of it.

B We've kind of talked about the evolution of this program, but it squarely sits within Taubman, which is, you know, it sits in an architecture school. For all intents and purposes, it is an architecture school. It is an architecture school.

C Well, I should say architecture and planning.

B Yeah. Well, so how's the reception around that been? And I say that, you know, with highest love to all of my architecture people and professors. We do kind of wrap our arms around each other and treat us extra special ourselves. Extra special. So what's the reception of the program been like within the architecture school?

C Yeah, I'll just share very frankly when we started the degree, when we started the planning work for the degree, you know, having faculty workshops and things like this, I think it's, it's reasonable to say that the starting point was somewhere below zero in terms of level of excitement. Like there was sort of negative sentiment towards the idea of urban tech. And in my reading, and that came from a kind of maybe knee jerk reaction to tech writ large. In American culture in the prior years, which has been quite negative, right? Since Cambridge Analytica, since things like Tesla's running into walls and people getting attacked in the back of Ubers and people having cocaine vendors and Airbnbs, we've seen all of the negative side of this. And so a lot of the work that I did early on was to kind of dig out of that hole that we were in in terms of negative perceptions and talk about like, yes, those things are true and those are risks that we should work to mitigate or push back against. But there are also really fantastic teams like the Office of New Urban Mechanics in Boston that use technology to reimagine how government works, or a public policy lab in New York, which works with governments in New York City and at the federal level to do really awesome user research. And again, kind of applying a lot of the skills that we're talking about. And there are really cool companies that are doing the work of architects and planners, but through new means like Cedar, which is a company in Austin, Texas that some alums of ours started, or Monograph, which is based in San Francisco, also started by alums.

C And so it was really just trying to paint maybe a more clear eyed picture about where again like where architecture and planning, the AEC industry kind of or sector, like where it is different from those other practices and where it might be aligned and where there might be forward opportunity. And so, you know, I think that largely was successful because we got off the ground and we have people from architecture and planning who are teaching urban technology classes. The amazing talent and energy of our students did a ton of work. Like once they showed up and people saw them in the classroom and saw them in the building and they said, you know, like, wow, this isn't an architecture student. But they're really excited about making the city better. This isn't a planning student, but they're really excited about affordable housing. Like I don't care what they call themselves, they care about what I care about. So that that was very important for us and you know, intentionally tried to bring in people from across the college to be part of it, to make it take root.

C And then, you know, it's not without its moments of friction also. And so like we have a different way of doing studio based courses than our colleagues in architecture do it how been in architecture you still have for the most part, like your desk, that is your real estate for the entire semester and, and you work there in a pod of about a dozen students. And in urban tech, we decided to model our Studio courses, more on what we see after college, which is group based work by default. And so there's like a higher level of energy and therefore a higher level of voices and activity in the studios. And you can imagine with two modes side by side, it's like not always without some challenges. So we're sorting through that stuff now. And I kind of constantly think of this type of work, this kind of cultural or organizational transformation work is. It is ultimately about the way that cultures meet each other.

C So it's a lot like thinking about a border that might have some contention or friction, but might also have a healthy amount of trade. And how do we kind of shift from the friction into the trade of tangible and intangible benefits?

B And you and I talked previously and you kind of mentioned the setup of the studio. Has there been any healthy curiosity around the architecture professors thinking, oh, maybe, maybe this open studio concept is, is a, is an interesting way to even approach how we teach design studio?

C Yeah, well, so since we built our urban tech studio, which is a, you know, kind of shared space, like common room, we Taubman Architecture has then built something we call studio reassemble, which is a zone of our, you know, have a big open floor plate area like many architecture schools do. Kind of took a quarter of it and made very different, very dynamic, very expressive, like work pods of different types, some in the round, some with big long tables, some with, you know, little clusters. And so that I think was, you know, we were a predecessor to that. And so it's at the end of the day, like, for instance, we are growing the number of students that we have in the building. We are not growing the building. So it is kind of just math at a certain point that we need to explore different ways of working just from a practical standpoint, you know, pedagogically, culturally. Like, I personally believe there are imperatives there as well. But if you don't agree with that, you still have to at least contend with the fact that you can't keep adding students to a building and not do something about it.

B Yeah. What does studio culture within your studios kind of feel and look like? I mean, it's been interesting. I've seen a lot more students come on TikTok or Instagram and talk about the studio culture. You know, they, towards the end of the semester, they always have this kickoff wheel of like, how many hours did you sleep like on the day of the final crit? So what does studio culture look like in an urban tech studio?

C Gosh, I wish I had some of the students here to keep me honest. So I was just aware I can give you what I think I see and what we intend to. But this is an example where I think having prior experience in that educational environment, it taught me the power of that project based learning that is hands on, that is shoulder to shoulder and therefore both competitive and collaborative. And that is based in a place that what the musician Brian Eno calls the genius of the scene emerges when you spend time in a place. And so that's the stuff that we wanted to keep, the things that we wanted to give up or transition away from was the ownership and the kind of preciousness that comes with that of like, this is my spot. So we wanted it to be more of a shared space, more dynamic, up, standing up, walking around, not sitting at a desk the whole time. We wanted to shift from sketching on trace paper to sketching on vertical surfaces that make the work more visible and from further away. So we use whiteboards.

C Very common in a industrial design or a UI UX kind of design setting. Less common in architecture. But we have final reviews like we do in architecture. We have been very intentional about that. So we create kind of an invitation, if you will, that talks about the things that are important to us and the types of comments that we think are useful and the types of comments we think are less useful to try to get people away from personal opinions and base it more on critiquing the argument or the kind of substantive pieces of the work. So we're trying to frame an environment that is aspirational, like that people inherently want to do really good work rather than they are like bullied into doing good work by their professors or their peers, you know, or like some kind of opaque boogeyman. So it's, it's a work in progress, I will say self criticism. I think that we've maybe been a little bit too nice and that there's not like quite the level of energy that I think we need to have.

C And so one of the things that I'm going to be doing in the class that I teach in just a couple weeks is requiring everybody to make a working prototype as part of the course, which like, you know, the final presentation for Urban Tech is often it's a slide deck of mock ups and diagrams. And so that's great and we can have a really great meaningful conversation about it. But the engagement and the level of energy changes when somebody says, okay, now you try it. Or you know, like as we had in this class last year, somebody brought this, they had built a plant sensor and a dashboard that processes and displays the data of the health of that plant. And so when they put the plant down and they take the sensor and they put it in and the dashboard lights up, it's just, it's a meaningfully different punctuation mark in the conversation and then new questions emerge because we take it seriously in a way that you don't necessarily when it's just a mock up. And so I think that's kind of akin to maybe an architecture studio where you just have sketches or one where you have sketches and a model, something like that. And so we're kind of like learning as we go how to orchestrate these conversations and the outputs of these conversations in a way that kind of matches the aspirations that I and my faculty colleagues have from a like cultural and experiential standpoint.

B One of the interesting things that we often talk about in women defining AI and you talked about kind of the need to be more curious around technology in the built environment anyways, is this movement towards the ability for non technical people to get really technical. How does that evolve or change or does it change your curriculum around the need for code or just understanding the.

C Frameworks of, of technology? Yeah, I mean I'm still in the camp of AI replaces the manual, not the engineer. And so you know, that may change in a year or five years from now. The rate of change is quite intense. But I think at the end of the day there's a person who is saying in the physical dirty meat space universe we have this issue and I need to solve it in the physical dirty meatspace universe. And so like sure, you might use AI to help you understand that issue. For instance, you might use AI as part of your coding and processing of interviews that you do with users needs discovery. You might use AI to build a mock up. You at this point probably don't use it to deploy something.

C You don't use it to make like a production ready piece of software outside of the confines of huge companies that yes, have lots of AI, but also have lots of people doing, you know, DevOps and everything else. So I think it's a little bit overblown some of the, the fears of like replacement. But I absolutely believe that man machine, centaur vibe coding trajectory is really important. And so for instance, because what we want our students to do technically is to be comfortable and be able to like sketch in code, if not actually formally make production ready code, that means that when they get to the design studio and they have an idea for Say the plant dashboard that I mentioned, it's not a conflict of interest to Vibe code it. Like, I'm not going to grade them down because they didn't write the code because I'm not teaching a Python and JavaScript course, teaching a course about what you design and why it meets the challenge that you identified. So I actually want them to take those shortcuts and I think it's healthy.

B To prototype it quicker.

C And yeah, yeah, I think that the nuance that maybe your audience might also identify with is when it comes to image production, where my students don't have as much education just in basic, like image production representation in the way that architects do. And yet I want them to make very compelling imagery. And so what I have found is if you just straight up use a generative image maker, it has all the failings of those algorithms. It looks plastic, it looks fake, et cetera. And so the thing that I'm interested in is how we basically build our own workflows that like you might use Genai to produce an image of a scene, but then you might trace it so that it's in your own hand or it's abstracted into a diagram that is yours. And so those kinds of hybrid spaces are what I'm most excited about to keep exploring.

B So you mentioned that the program is growing. What type of impact do you ultimately want this program to have? Would you love for it to grow in its entirety? Would you love to see other urban tech programs spin up? What's your hope for the future?

C It would be, I mean, like, selfishly, I would love it if somebody else created an urban tech degree because then we'd have somebody to copy, you know, somebody to learn from. Right. And also just somebody to like commiserate with, to share experiences with, just have more data points. So that would be great. But I think the ultimate thing for me is seeing where the students go. And so this first graduating cohort going into full time jobs or going, we have also some students going to master's degrees in planning or information science and then eventually onto careers afterwards. And that's the ultimate proof point here. It's like how many of our students end up in leadership positions that change the course of a big firm, create a new firm that is disruptive, go into public sector leadership and unlock some of the blockages that are there in ways that are really powerful.

C Like all of that is the ultimate proof point. But, you know, as of today, we've had, we're welcoming the fifth cohort. We're at 170 students, give or take. That's about 40% of the undergraduate student body at Tao Medicine. And so that was zero in 2022 when our first students came. So it's been very rapid and exciting and maddening because of that. But right now we're really focused on making sure that this machine can operate in a stable way and that we don't transmit anxieties to the students. I just want this to be a supportive place for the students.

C I want them to have a good experience. And we believe that if they do that, then after they leave here, they'll do interesting things.

B Because you do have such a deep understanding and background in architecture. What healthy mindset shifts can we be creating as professionals to ensure the success of this space and the melding of architecture and technology going forward?

C Yeah, I mean, this question is what I think about every day beyond what I just described. Like, for our urban tech students, I think maybe another way to think about the ultimate success of the degree will be if we see some of what we're doing rubbing off on the existing Masters of Urban Planning and Masters of Architecture programs. And so, you know, I think about like the most plausible version of that. I am just, I guess, shocked that as far as I know, architecture schools do not really ever do any user research. They don't train students to do user research, understand user needs, not in a structured way. So if you go to industrial design or UI ux, like I mentioned previously, extremely codified methods for how you structure an interview, different types of tools you might use, like card sorting or you know, other mechanisms to get to an understanding that you can act on later. And so really basic things like user research or writing for a general audience, communicating to a general audience, or in fact like coding and writing software to solve your problems. Like these are all things that I think still there's a lot of purchase within architecture and that you can probably, I don't know, like, can you reduce the amount of design that you do by 10% to make room for the other stuff? Probably.

C But I think maybe the other area of, let's call it opportunity for architecture is to kind of be clear eyed about what sorts of timelines and agency we trade in. And my, like, very gross characterization of what I see through the like keyhole view I have of academic architecture in the US is that kind of train students to think about like 20 plus year timelines. Right. It's like you don't, don't really get too bogged down in all the technical details like design that amazing museum or that amazing housing complex, and we'll just kind of assume that it will work out. And I guess I feel more impatient than that. I feel like it's imperative that people who actually care for the city, who actually care for the people that live in those cities, want them to be places of, of shared prosperity, joy, sustainability, that they work with urgency. And so that means maybe toning down the grand visioning and ramping up the ability to understand the actual challenges of economy and policy today and to find the cracks in that armor where you can make a difference. And so I think, like, if I try to summarize that we've kind of indulged the utopian vision perhaps a little bit too much, or that if we maintain that utopian vision within the community of architects, I'd hope that we could cultivate a parallel conversation that's like, okay, long term and also more near term.

A Hi disruptors. Thank you. Thank you for joining us today on an episode of Practice Disrupted. If you like the content for today's show, you can find all of our past episodes over on practiceofarchitecture.com podcast. Be a part of the conversation by joining me, our speakers, and other disruptors in our community@practiceofarchitecture.com community. Our social media handle is practiceofarch. That's practice at the of Arch. We'd love to hear from you, so feel free to drop us a DM and say hello.

A Tune in next week for a new conversation on change in the profession.