Abstract
What role might design education play in preparing urban change-makers in the 21st century? In 2021, the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture & Urban Planning launched the first undergraduate program in the United States focused on Urban Technology. This statement of pedagogy describes how the Bachelor of Science in Urban Technology integrates design methods and coursework into a curriculum addressing the intersection of digital technology, urbanism, and city change-making. The program responds to the limited integration of service and interaction design in fields such as urban planning and architecture despite the growing need to design for human outcomes like accessibility, equity, health, and sustainability. It also challenges conventional human-centered design and design thinking approaches that struggle to address complex urban systems. Instead, the program emphasizes a transdisciplinary curriculum combining urban studies, computational skills, and design methods. The program addresses urban technology as a broad field encompassing digital products and services that affect how cities are seen and made sense of, shaped and built, and how urban spaces are inhabited and utilized. Core design studios synthesize students’ learning experiences in courses on urbanism and digital technology, progressing from interaction to service design and culminating in strategic design. This sequence enables students to integrate technical and urban insights, fostering systems-level thinking and innovation. With its experimental pedagogy, this program explores new configurations of methods and frameworks from the related fields of study and aims to redefine design’s role in addressing 21st-century urban challenges. The program positions design as a way to explore and invent possible futures—a transformative tool, necessary yet insufficient on its own, to foster equity, sustainability, and systemic change in urban contexts.
DOI
https://doi.org/10.21606/drslxd.2025.110
Citation
Wizinsky, M.,and Boyer, B.(2025) Design, Technology, and Cities: Integrating design education into an undergraduate degree in Urban Technology, in Clemente, V., Gomes, G., Reis, M., Félix, S., Ala, S., Jones, D. (eds.), Learn X Design 2025, 22-24 September 2025, Aveiro, Portugal. https://doi.org/10.21606/drslxd.2025.110
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
Conference Track
Statement of Pedagogy
Design, Technology, and Cities: Integrating design education into an undergraduate degree in Urban Technology
What role might design education play in preparing urban change-makers in the 21st century? In 2021, the University of Michigan Taubman College of Architecture & Urban Planning launched the first undergraduate program in the United States focused on Urban Technology. This statement of pedagogy describes how the Bachelor of Science in Urban Technology integrates design methods and coursework into a curriculum addressing the intersection of digital technology, urbanism, and city change-making. The program responds to the limited integration of service and interaction design in fields such as urban planning and architecture despite the growing need to design for human outcomes like accessibility, equity, health, and sustainability. It also challenges conventional human-centered design and design thinking approaches that struggle to address complex urban systems. Instead, the program emphasizes a transdisciplinary curriculum combining urban studies, computational skills, and design methods. The program addresses urban technology as a broad field encompassing digital products and services that affect how cities are seen and made sense of, shaped and built, and how urban spaces are inhabited and utilized. Core design studios synthesize students’ learning experiences in courses on urbanism and digital technology, progressing from interaction to service design and culminating in strategic design. This sequence enables students to integrate technical and urban insights, fostering systems-level thinking and innovation. With its experimental pedagogy, this program explores new configurations of methods and frameworks from the related fields of study and aims to redefine design’s role in addressing 21st-century urban challenges. The program positions design as a way to explore and invent possible futures—a transformative tool, necessary yet insufficient on its own, to foster equity, sustainability, and systemic change in urban contexts.