This class is aimed at teaching designers and planners in “ways of seeing” — and acting on — systems of urban technologies. These systems, such as app-based delivery, autonomous driving, or algorithmically managed rental housing portfolios, increasingly shape life in contemporary cities. Yet their scale and heterogenous makeup — composed of material infrastructure, spatial territories, software and data, organizations and labor, financial and regulatory instruments, and everyday social practice — challenge the conventional investigative boundaries of design practice.

This class will help students develop methods to make these systems legible as a necessary precondition for shaping them, particularly in how they distribute power, resources, risks, and access. Using real-world urban technologies as case studies, students will learn how to define the boundaries of the system and make it legible through research and techniques of knowledge representation. They will learn how to perform “close readings” of particular system components and artifacts. Finally, by understanding these systems, students will learn to locate the designer/planner’s agency: determining who could change what, with what authority, and to what ends.