More and more data

Fifteen years, many data sets, and a changing design landscape, 2025

I entered practice during a time when large data sets were emerging as tools to make visible the unseen forces shaping urban space and experience. Soon after, post-recession real estate market dynamics overlapped with the inescapable and mounting pressure to scale design capacity and urban value (in all uses of this word) using big data, and later, machine learning models.

I have developed and worked with both urban and interior sensor networks, civic data, mobile device data, layered approaches to machine learning analytics, and generative neural networks trained on large and novel image-based data sets. I have also developed a perspective of critical optimism on the creation and use of data sets within design processes. I see data as a powerful way to translate human values into design that can balance contextual and cultural relevance with the imperative to scale beyond a single instance, and to reach more people and communities in need. I also observe and reveal the ways in which data and data-driven systems can amplify value systems that run counter to design values.

Data is a powerful mediating element that is inextricably bound to life and the agency of design practice in the 21st century and I seek to use it rigorously, ethically, and in the service of a better, more just, and more beautiful world.

I act as a critic through published work and design practice to address the use of data and surrounding systems of technology to amplify value systems that run counter to civic values and meaningful design. I analyze urban places to re-see them through uncommon perspectives on culture only available through a data-view, and I imagine alternative futures for smart things (like cities and homes) that are grounded in values of humanism and civic life. Most of my work in this last territory walks a fine line between pragmatism and speculative design.

The tools and techniques we use to engage and design with data are changing rapidly, and the conversations have shifted in the past decade from perspectives on ethical urbanism and the dark matter that data collection efforts overlook to deep fears and dreams surrounding human expertise and rapidly changing relationships between humans and non-humans within the design process. In the field of design, we are also limited in terms of relevant data sets that address the conditions of the built world. For example, if we want to know something or make something that is relevant to local context, the data sets must reflect this ambition. If we want to know something about formal relationships or typological DNA, we must build data sets that reflect this non-text-based information. Constructing such data sets requires both effort and architectural intelligence to ensure that the data is sufficiently robust and reflective of the conditions from which we can learn. Across the varied phases of technological advance, data remains largely at the service of disciplinary, political, economic, and professional systems and their value systems.

Through careful work with data through design, I hope to operate back up on these systems and to chip away at deep rather than shallow change in the operating frameworks that shape our built world and our interactions within it.