A Postphenomenological Approach to Computational Design Ethics

Computational Design From Promise to Practice Nicole Gardner M. Hank Haeusler Yannis Zavoleas Table of Contents FOREWORD 4 Mark Burry Introduction: Computational Design from Promise to Practice 7 Nicole Gardner and M. Hank Haeusler PEDAGOGY, PROCESS, PRAXIS Digital-Free Architecture? 16 Yannis Zavoleas Symbiotic Design Process: Digital Modelling and Physical Prototyping 24 Cristina Ramos-Jaime A Postphenomenological Approach to Computational Design Ethics 42 Nicole Gardner Theory (Methods) and Design in the Second Machine Age 56 M. Hank Haeusler On the Nature of Change: Parallelisms and Intersections in Science, Design, and Policy 69 Alessandra Fabbri CONSTRUCTING The Centaur Pod Pavilion 80 Belinda J. Dunstan, Alessandra Fabbri, M. Hank Haeusler, Cristina Ramos-Jaime and K. Daniel Yu Project: Bio-Shelters 96 Project: Fologram Workshop UNSW Open Day Mixed Reality Installation 98 Project: Opera Bar VIP Table 100 Conference: HOLOSYNC: A Comparative Study on Mixed Reality and Contemporary 102 Communication Methods in a Building Design Context Conference: Hands on Design: Integrating Haptic Interaction and Feedback in Virtual 103 Environments for Enhanced Immersive Experiences in Design Practice Conference: Streamlining the Modelling to Virtual Reality Process 104 Conference: Augmented Reality in the Design Process: Using (VFX) Motion Tracking to 105 Conduct Research on the Performance of Augmented Reality CONTEXTUALISING Cycle Path Generation Using Digital Slime Molds 108 K. Daniel Yu Project: Participation Plus 118 Conference: Enabling Low Cost Human Presence Tracking 120 Conference: Discoverable Desks: Finding Location and Orientation in a Mobile Workplace 121 Conference: Urban Pinboard: Establishing a Bi-Directional Workflow Between Web-Based 122 and Computational Tools Conference: HUMPBACK: Introducing and Evaluating a GeoJSON Constructor Tool for 123 Grasshopper CALIBRATING Scripting Building Regulations to Generate Permissible Building Envelopes 126 Madeleine Johanson and Nazmul Khan Considering the Implications of Applying Deep Learning in the Built Environment 137 Nariddh Khean Understanding the Premise for Browser-based Modelling Applications in the AEC Industry 146 Emily Leung Conference: Optimising Image Classification: Implementation of Convolutional Neural 154 Network Algorithms to Distinguish Between Plans and Sections Within the AEC Industry Conference: Building Intelligence through Generative Design: Structural Analysis and 155 Optimisation Informed by Material Performance Conference: Developing a Workflow for Daylight Simulation 156 Conference: Optimisation for Sport Stadium Designs - Advantages for Shifting from Macro 157 Level to Micro Level Viewing Optimisation in Stadium Design AFTERWORD: 158 In the Architect’s Mind: Drawing (,) Architecture’s Future Yannis Zavoleas Author Biographies and Acknowledgement 174 A Postphenomenological Approach to Computational Design Ethics In order to design and shape future cities, and to devise courses of action aimed at changing existing city conditions into preferred ones (Simon 1969), it stands to reason that designers should first understand how cities work. In recent years the renewed trend towards neo-urban science has insisted that to understand contemporary cities, one must first understand digital information flows and their networks (Batty 2017, 2013a, 2013b). This approach privileges the analysis of large quantities of so-called ‘big-data’ to reveal previously impossible to see living patterns, habits, routines, and correlations. In turn, big data analytics are used to evidence ‘urban problems’ and are operationalized as part of urban technological solutions, more popularly known as smart city initiatives or strategies. Undoubtedly, big data offers a powerful perspective for city-planning and policy development, yet the centralization of such approaches in urban governance and design decision-making has served to advance the problematic myth that “...large data sets offer a higher form of intelligence and knowledge that can generate insights that were previously impossible, with the aura of truth, objectivity, and accuracy” (Boyd and Crawford 2012, p.663). Put another way, smart city rhetoric tends to promote a positivist approach to understanding spatial production as that which transcends the so-called subjective veil of human experience. As I have argued elsewhere, the risks associated with an unquestioning reliance on aggregated digital data include the potential to obscure important idiosyncrasies and specificities of context in ways that can lead to biased and unjust systems, and ultimately, dehumanized understandings of spatial production (Gardner and Hespanhol 2018). Further problematic, as Rob Kitchin (2016) notes, is how big data logic is endorsed as self-evident, “free of theory or human bias or framing” (p. 4). Nonetheless, given the pervasiveness of digitally-mediated systems and social processes that constitute the spatial production of contemporary cities, how else might built environment design professionals make sense of the city? Nicole Gardner A perhaps modest way to counter big data-driven urbanism, and one that draws on postphenomenology, is to (re)focus our attention to the scale of human-technology relations. As Shannon Mattern (2017) argues, “[w]e need to shift our gaze and look at data in context…We need to see data’s human, institutional, and technological creators, its 42 Nicole Gardner curators, its preservers, its owners and brokers, its “users,” its hackers and critics”. In more traditional artifact-oriented and aesthetically-driven design methods and designerly ways of seeing, digitally-mediated interactions are seldom given due consideration. Yet, a focus on human-technology relations reveals a defining feature of contemporary urban environments—and indeed a cultural force of the twenty-first century—namely, the smartphone user. This is significant as people’s everyday interactions with digital technologies, and especially mobile/smartphones that are driving a mobile-only Internet trend (Australian Bureau of Statistics 2018; Baffour et al. 2016), are those that feed big data and propel artificially intelligent (AI) smart urban systems. Simultaneously, mobile technology practices are also contributing to reconfiguring long-held notions of etiquette, sociability, mobility, and meaning-making in urban environments. Given this, examining human-technology relations in urban space (socio-material-cultural contexts) is argued here as a way of revealing, not only the humanness and interactional nature of big data production, but also more generally a richer understanding of the contemporary production of (urban) space in order to critically engage with the ethical challenges of our digital present. In an era where global technology companies are partnering with local governments to play increasingly large roles in the design and operation of cities—as exampled by Google Sidewalk Labs project for a district in Toronto, Canada (Cecco 2019; Goodman and Powles 2019)—now more than ever is the time for built environment design professionals to develop more nuanced understandings of human–technology relations to challenge smart city rhetoric and inform ethically guided design practice. Importantly, the aim here is not to abandon valuable computational understandings of city systems, but rather that by revealing and critiquing “…the politics and technical and epistemological shortcomings of smart city initiatives…they can be reimagined and repositioned in more inclusive, open and relational ways” (Kitchin et al. 2016, p.41). As postphenomenology advances a praxis-oriented approach to the analysis of human-technology relations and derives philosophically-oriented questions from real-world empirical observations, it is viewed here as a productive starting point for critical design inquiry and for methods that can be taken up across research, pedagogical, and industry contexts. The approach to examining human-technology relations in urban space that is advanced here builds from postphenomenological thinking, but also draws on the work of earlier urban philosophers such as Georges Perec (2010) and Michel de Certeau (1984), and analytical techniques from William H. Whyte (1980) to Nuri Kim and Adam Greenfield (2011), to frame urban observation as a critical act in-and-of itself. In this way, the very act of observing intends to make ‘visible’ the sometimes–intangible aspects of humantechnology mediation towards countering the ambivalence provoked by our rapid-paced digital culture. The following sections of this chapter further outline postphenomenology, its ethical relevance, and how it can inform the exploration and scrutiny of contemporary urban digital culture. This chapter concludes with reflections on how this approach informs a pedagogical strategy for a core theory course Computational Design Theory II - CODE1210 A Postphenomenological Approach to Computational Design Ethics 43 in the Bachelor of Computational Design (CoDe) in the Built Environment faculty at the University of New South Wales (UNSW) that aims to foster ethical awareness in the application of digital and computational technologies in and for the design of the built environment. Computational Design Theory: Postphenomenological foundations Postphenomenology is a philosophy of technology and a contemporary interpretation of phenomenology that “combines an empirical orientation with philosophical analysis” (Rosenberger and Verbeek 2015, p.11). While postphenomenology builds from classical phenomenology’s rejection of the subject/object divide and centralization of lived experience through the examination of action-in-the-world, it also departs from it in several key ways. Primarily, and what makes postphenomenology particularly relevant here, is its explicit concern with redressing classical phenomenology’s conceptualization of technology, that has rested heavily on Martin Heidegger’s (1977) later work “The Question concerning technology”. In this way, postphenomenology makes three key moves. Firstly, like other strands of contemporary phenomenology it accepts that meanings are revealed through human action-in-the-world however rejects the classical Husserlian essentialism that contends the world appears before consciousness and that meanings are thereby pre-existing and stable. Secondly, it rejects the Heideggerian stance that science and technology create distance from access to the lifeworld by reframing forms of science and technology as mediators in peoples’ interactions, experiences and meaning-making in everyday life. Thirdly, it centralises the role of pragmatism and praxis, and pays serious attention to ‘what things do’ (Verbeek 2005). In short, postphenomenology describes an empirical turn towards a praxis-oriented analysis of bodily relations to technologies, that is “sensitive to materiality” and advances an inter-relational or “interactive ontology” (Ihde in Ralon 2010). For philosopher of technology and pioneering postphenomenologist Don Ihde (1990; 2009), human-world relations are almost always human-technology-world relations. Put another way, our experiences in and of the world are almost always technologically mediated (Ihde 1990). Ihde’s interest lies in understanding these mediations, including the role technology plays in everyday human experience, and how human-technology relations influence the ways humans perceive, know, and interpret the world. To explore this Ihde (1990; 2009) developed a phenomenology of technics that explores “the spectrum and varieties of the human experience with technologies” (2009, p.42). This is also described as a praxis-perception model that centralizes the analysis of the perceptual aspects of the relations between human beings and their world (Verbeek 2005). This model includes the key concepts of embodiment relations and multistability, as well as three further categories of human-technological mediation including hermeneutic relations, alterity relations, and background relations (Ihde 1990; 2009). The significance of the concept of embodiment relations to understanding urban environments lies in the way it directs focus to the body and to the ways that technologies mediate a user’s “actional 44 Nicole Gardner and perceptual engagement with the world” (Rosenberger and Verbeek 2015, p.14). In terms of urban spatial production, embodiment relations give focus to how humantechnology relations influence the ways people behave in urban space and make sense of, or interpret and give meaning to, urban space. Applying the concept of embodiment relations to, for example, technologies-in-use such as the smartphone, reframes the device as an interactional means through which a user communicates socially, encounters the urban environment, and in short, experiences the world. Further central to Ihde’s postphenomenological perspective is the argument that technologies are “multistable” in the sense that they “have structured ambiguities that allow what first appears to be the “same” technology to be differently situated and have different trajectories” (2010, p.126). The smartphone is understood as exhibiting multistability as, while it may be a massproduced and identical artifact it can be put-to-use and made meaningful in multifarious ways. Ihde’s (1990) praxis-perception model can be further interpreted as intensities of mediation, bodily interaction and/or cognitive load that operate to capture, direct and filter a user’s attention in certain ways that in turn shape different ways of being-in-theworld. More specifically, hermeneutic relations describe how a technological artifact can direct its user away from the world and towards the artifact itself. Ihde’s examples include the wristwatch and a thermometer that both facilitate the translation of measurable real-world conditions to be ‘read’ by the user through a display or audio interface. Alterity relations refer to interactions with artifacts that reflect a proxy humanness through some kind of interactional capacity with examples including ATMs, GPS devices, and digital assistants such as Apple’s Siri, Google Home or Amazon’s Alexa. In Galit Wellner’s (2016) postphenomenological and historical analysis she identifies the mobile phone as a “quasi-other” and the mobile phone screen as a “quasi-face”. Particularly, she describes the technical evolutions of the mobile/smartphone’s screen—it’s growing size and interactive functionality—as an “endless effort to simulate a face” (Wellner 2016, p.141). Lastly, background relations refer to the operation of technological artifacts that maintain or augment human environments yet are cognitively and/or perceptibly unobtrusive, such as air-conditioning systems and ambient data on digital screens. The value of the postphenomenological praxis-perception model of analysis for those who design, deliver, and produce urban and built space is that it varies perspectives to gain insight. Directing attention to the dynamic space of human-technology interactions affords an alternate way of seeing urban space that displaces and reconfigures dominant physicalist perspectives of spatial production and notions of space as a container for action. Moreover, this alternate perspective invites a different set of questions to be asked about (design) decision-making and the ways that forms of influence and power flow through far less fixed and/or tangible means. Particularly, as postphenomenology rejects the modern notion of the active human subject and the passive or neutral technological object, notions of agency and intentionality are associated to the actional space of humantechnology relations. In a key example of this, philosopher of technology, Peter-Paul A Postphenomenological Approach to Computational Design Ethics 45 Verbeek (2008) illustrates the co-constitution of subjectivity and objectivity in a case study of obstetric ultrasound technology. Here he argues that ultrasound technology “is not simply a functional means to make visible an unborn child in the womb. It actively helps to shape the way the unborn child is given in human experience, and in doing so it informs the choices his or her expecting parents make” (Verbeek 2008, p.14). Recalling Ihde’s notion of hermeneutic relations, Verbeek describes how ultrasound registers presence (through high frequency sound waves) and translates and represents this information in ways that inform how we perceive and interpret it (2008, p.15). Drawing on Michel Foucault’s work, Verbeek further shows that the use of obstetric ultrasound constitutes the subject in specific ways against a background of medical discourse, standards, and measures. In this way, postphenomenological analysis opens up ethical considerations. In an urban context, a postphenomenological approach gives focus to exploring the constitutive roles that mobile and embedded digital technologies can and do play in the relations between people and urban space. This considers, in what ways are people’s experiences, interpretations, and rights to urban space being maintained, heightened, or transformed through mediating technologies? Or in Ihde’s terms, what is amplified and what is reduced? Examining intangibles: Methods to explore urban digital culture The UNSW CoDe degree introduces students to a wide range of concepts, theories, processes, and digital and computational technologies and systems to design both with and through. In the overall program structure, computational design theory is positioned as central to developing critical knowledge about not only how, but also when and why to adopt and apply digital and computational processes, technologies, and systems in and for the design and construction of the built environment. In the second-year computational design theory course Computational Design Theory II - CODE1210 the overarching theme is contextualization and here postphenomenology informs an approach to exploring the implications of technological (digital and computational) systems by observing and documenting humantechnology relations in an urban context. Urban space is already a significant meeting point of the human and the technological and while various forms of human-technology relations play out here, one of the most dominant human-technology relations that can be readily observed is people’s use of the mobile/smartphone. Given this, and to get a sense of how human-mobile phone relations have changed over time, the lecture content and course material draws on a range of existing empirical case studies (considered to be a valid source of data for postphenomenological analysis (Wellner 2016)). Curated with a focus on how mobile and embedded technologies relate to claims of urban public space ‘transformation’ (Gardner 2017), this literature encompasses mobile digital communications technologies research from the late 1990s onwards, and includes numerous disciplinary perspectives from sociology (Sheller 2004; Urry 2007), cultural anthropology (Ito et al. 2009), urban studies (Crang and Graham 2007), to media and communications studies (de Souza e Silva 2006; de Souza e Silva and Sheller 2015; Farman 2012, 2013; Katz and Aakhus 2002; Ling and Campbell 2011; Wilken and Goggin 2015) to name a few. 46 Nicole Gardner Further evidencing the pervasive cultural phenomenon of the smartphone—albeit one that is actively perpetuated by global tech corporations themselves—the evolutions, upgrades, updates, new functionalities, changes in size, hackability, interoperability, privacy settings, and associated human-technology behaviours—mobile technology practices—have equally become click-bait in daily news cycles and popular media. As such, news reports and current events related to mobile and embedded digital technologies form part of the resource content for lectures and course readings. Collectively, this content is further organised under the three key topic headings: encountering, negotiating, and appropriating. The topic of Encountering draws out how various studies have explored how mobile/smartphone technologies mediate ways of moving, practices of attention, and social interaction in urban space (Kesselring 2006; Gergen 2002, 2008, 2010; Greenfield and Shepard 2007; Habuchi 2006; Hampton et al. 2010; Hampton et al. 2015; Höflich 2005; Ito et al. 2006; Ling and Campbell 2011; Willis 2008). The topic of Negotiating refers to studies that have considered how mobile/smartphone technologies mediate perceptions of time (Urry 2007) and how this has influenced changes in social etiquette and redefined the concept of ‘being-there’ (Forunati 2002; Ito et al. 2006; Kopomaa 2004; Ling and Yittri 2002). Lastly, the topic of Appropriating draws on studies that have theorised how mobile/ smartphone technologies mediate a user’s spatial occupation in ways that can loosen established and normative understandings such as notions of public and private space. This includes reference to scholarship on new theories of space in relation to mobile digital technologies (Fujimoto 2006; Gordon & de Souza e Silva 2012; Hatuka and Toch 2016; Kopomaa 2004; Ito et al. 2009; Hampton et al. 2010; Hampton et al. 2015; Hulme and Truch 2006) as well as more specific case studies on mobile phone applications such as Google maps, Foursquare, Instagram, and Facebook to name a few (Farman 2012; 2013; Humphreys and Liao 2011; Humphreys and Liao 2013; Licoppe and Inada 2010; Liao and Humphreys 2015; Özkul 2014; Schwartz 2015; Schwartz and Hochman 2014). A core assessment of the Computational Design Theory II - CODE1210 course titled the ‘The Socio-digital Life of Small Urban Spaces’ asks student groups to unobtrusively observe human-technology relations in an allocated public realm site. In terms of methods, cues are taken from both well-established and recent studies, including those undertaken by Hampton et al. (2010, 2015) that explored the impacts of mobile communications and WiFi engagement in numerous public space sites across cities in the United States and Canada. These studies revisit and adapt Whyte’s (1980) socio-spatial urban analysis methods and adopt a combination of person-centered and place-centered behavioral mapping. To address more politically charged questions, and to address the postphenomenological concept of technologically-mediated background relations, urban observation methods are also informed by the “networked urbanism walkshop” developed by Adam Greenfield and Nurri Kim (2011). Here, Greenfield and Kim call for attention to three key ways in which the digital and the urban ‘come together’. This directs observers to locate how data in urban space is collected (e.g. CCTV, climate sensors, mobile technology practices), displayed (e.g. digital static and interactive screens), and acted upon (e.g. behaviors, automatic doors/barriers). Critically, this carries a political charge, as Greenfield and Kim A Postphenomenological Approach to Computational Design Ethics 47 assert that understanding the systems of networked urbanism, and “…its implications for the freedom to move and act, is vital to realising full citizenship in the congested, contested urban spaces of the twenty-first century” (2011, p.2). The walkshop method actively engages reflexivity as it urges participants to observe urban space with their eyes open to the “various manifestations of the [digital] network”, and its relationship to people within a space, but also the ways the network operates on and through themselves (Greenfield and Kim 2011). From a postphenomenological analysis perspective however a key limitation of adopting ‘unobtrusive’ urban observation methods is, of course, not necessarily knowing the specificities of mobile/smartphone engagement. For early mobile phone studies researchers, the limited functionality of the mobile phone meant unobtrusive observation in urban space could reasonably determine the nature of the human-technology relation taking place from verbally communicating (user talking with phone to ear) to text messaging (user’s head is angled toward a screen and fingers moving). Now however, as the smartphone is simultaneously a camera, calendar, compass, bank teller, email provider, e-wallet, health and fitness tracker, Internet portal, map, public transport ticket, newspaper, social media interface, stopwatch, and so on, it is far more difficult to determine what looking at a screen might mean. And while numerous empirical case study examples recruit participants in order to explore specific mobile technology practices using in-depth interview methods and diaries, scope and time limitations ruled these out. To overcome this—in part—the notion of urban observation in this course is not limited to observing situated human-technology mediations and to this end, and the exploration of related internet and social media sites formed a useful complement to on-site observations. Digital media provided a further way to understand expressions of individual and collective urban experience. And in this way, various urban public space sites across the local government area (LGA) of the City of Sydney have been explored as hybrid physical and digital spaces. The remainder of this chapter will re-look at some of these examples and discuss them with reference to a postphenomenological framework. Discussion It is by now a truism to say that mobile/smartphones are pervasive and have been enrolled into everyday life and put-to-use in a host of ways. Yet, in postphenomenological terms this describes the mobile/smartphone’s ‘drastic multistability’ which is also a characteristic which distinguishes it from other and preceding technologies. More specifically, when considering mobile/phone use across multiple urban public space sites these human-technology relations take on a distinctive character that can be read in relation to the socio-spatio-material characteristics of the site. For example, in Chifley Square, located in the Sydney central business district, on weeknights and weekends students observed how the square transformed from a commercial space to a skateboarder’s territory. Here, smartphones and digital cameras were engaged to record socio-spatial performances that were in turn uploaded and shared on social media sites 48 Nicole Gardner such as Facebook and Instagram. In this way, technological artifacts—smartphones and digital video/cameras—are used to engage with the performance of those present as well as absent-present others in an online space, as well as to manage and organise future skateboarding activities. Here the mobile/smartphone and digital camera is embodied in the sense that it is taken into and shapes the user’s bodily experience of skateboarding activities in that space. This sits in stark contrast to the mobile technology practices observed during weekdays where occupants can be far less interpersonally inclined and mobile/smartphones operate more often to draw the user’s attention away from the space. But, on weeknights and weekends the (mobile) digital and urban come together in Chifley Square as a means of socialisation, representation, and territorialisation, in ways that resist its normative and regulated use (Fig. 1). In the larger and more transitory space of Martin Place people on weekdays were also observed engaging with the mobile screen (heads down behavior) as a potential tactic of ‘avoidance’ and a way to control and manage their engagement with others. Students in 2015 described how here “the digital space [became] a way for people to hide within a physical space” (Fig. 2). Here, and in other site observations the focus on exploring human- Fig. 1 Chifley Square, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 2015. © Simon Giang, Jonathon Wong, Sarah Xaviera. Fig. 2 The socio-digital life of urban space, Martin Place, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 2015. © Madeleine Johanson and Lachlan Sharah. A Postphenomenological Approach to Computational Design Ethics 49 technology relations related to human movement, social proximity, and forms of spatial appropriation. At Town Hall Square (Fig. 3), Wynyard Park (Fig. 4.), and Tumbalong Park technologically mediated practices of meandering, lingering, perching, and leaning on edges and ledges were documented. As the mobile device was put-to-use however, users were also observed occupying 'obscure spaces' such as niches, and were often alone, faced away from each other, screen-focused and tended to maintain certain distances from others to establish proxy forms of privacy in public space. In these examples the material technology of the mobile/smartphone is taken into the user’s bodily experience in two senses. Firstly, it forms an extension to the corporeal body and is seen to influence how people situate themselves in space, and secondly it extends the user’s social and cognitive body as it facilitates access to online knowledge and proxy forms of social presence beyond the constraints of their physical location (e.g. phone conversations, text messaging and social networking applications). The mobile device is embodied in the ways it operates as an interface to access experience but is not the object of experience in use. At Barangaroo Headland Park, technological engagement was observed as both less obvious and less introspective. Mobile/smartphone technologies were typically engaged in ways that appeared more urban environment focused, and with people appearing more often in pairs or groups. Those engaging with technological devices included Fig. 3 Town Hall Square, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 2017. © Lisa Doan, Tom Wyburn, and Alan Wang. Fig. 4 Wynyard Park, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 2018. © Michael Wu. 50 Nicole Gardner Fig. 5 Barangaroo Headland Park, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 2018. © Danielle Bisazza, Nelson Chen, Joshua Song. Fig. 6 Tumbalong Park, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, 2017. © Aaron Djong, Lachlan Brown, and Ethan Gonzaga. those engaged in fitness activities or ‘selfie’ taking, often against the harbour backdrop (Fig. 5). People were observed wearing tracking devices and/or ear/headphones to perceptually withdraw. In a postphenomenological sense, engaging with a fitness tracker constitutes a hermeneutic relation as human movement is geolocationally tracked, translated, and made ‘readable’ for the user on a screen as distance data and/or steps taken (and potentially third parties depending on the application and user’s privacy settings). Fitness tracker devices and health and activity apps on smartphones reflect a cultural preoccupation with tracking movement towards meeting healthy living targets such as the popularised notion of walking ‘10,000 daily steps’ . In this way, the technological artifact of the fitness tracker or smartphone is embodied in the production of knowledge about how people move in ways that can potentially influence decisions—for the individual user and potentially many others—about how people should move, about where to go in urban space and how far to remain on foot. Of course, data can be collected and displayed by devices other than the personal mobile/smartphone. While media displays were limited, and far less visually dominant, in many of the urban public sites studied, numerous examples were noted on the edges of Tumbalong Park, Darling Quarter. This is perhaps understandable given its characterization as an entertainment and leisure precinct, and that much of the area, including buildings and the public domain space has been newly built within the last ten years. In addition to ambient data displays for event information (Fig 6.) the area is also home to digital media art installations including a large interactive building-facade light installation, Luminous in collaboration with artist Bruce Ramus (Fig 7.), and Ryoji Ikeda’s data.scape. Ambient data displayed on digital screens and media facades in Darling Quarter provide examples of background relations in that they no not necessarily demand attention and/or interaction A Postphenomenological Approach to Computational Design Ethics 51 but nonetheless contribute to constructing the experience of that urban space. So, while contemporary human-technology relations encompass distributed, embedded, mobile, and personal technologies, and the mobile/smartphone can be put-to-use in multiple and diverse ways, one of the most dramatic shifts that has changed how people understand their relationship to urban space is ‘location awareness’. As Adam Greenfield (2017) reflects, “…everyone with a smartphone has, by definition, a free, continuously zoomable, selfFig. 7 Luminous, Tumbalong Park, Darling Quarter, Sydney, New updating, high-resolution map of every part of South Wales, Australia, 2019. © Nicole Gardner the populated surface of the Earth that goes with them wherever they go” (p.20-21). Smartphone users can see and understand their location in space in real-time on their device screen. In a postphenomenological sense and aligned to the concept of hermeneutic relations, the smartphone tracks, translates, and represents a user’s geo-locational position in ways that can encourage a user’s attention to switch between and away from their actual physical location. For Greenfield (2017) this is both profound and troubling as, he argues we become heavily “reliant on access to the network to accomplish ordinary goals” such as navigation (p.22). He laments further that “[i]n giving ourselves over to a way of knowing the world that relies completely on real-time access, we [are] at the mercy of something more contingent, more fallible and far more complicated than any paper map” (p.22). More generally, Greenfield’s (2017) critique assumes that engaging with a smartphone involves yielding an otherwise human capacity for decision-making and control to a complex and unknowable technological system. From another perspective, Adriana de Souza e Silva (2012) argues that location-aware technologies afford agency to the individual to “read and write locations” (p.119). Yet, agency lies neither wholly within a technological artifact or system, nor a human, rather, the capacity for and extent of agency is contingent on situations and contexts. This is made particularly apparent in explorations of Martin Place (Fig 2,) and Belmore Park where observations of human-technology relations brought to the fore conditions of homelessness in urban areas. Research shows that mobile/ smartphone device use is pervasive amongst homeless persons, and that in many ways, the mobile/smartphone carries heightened significance for vulnerable people in terms of the opportunity to access social support networks, information and services, as well as foster a sense of safety and security (Humphry 2014). Equally, while access to mobile Internet can afford those without conventional forms of fixed address an opportunity for representation and ways to be seen and heard in online spaces, at the same time homeless persons have limited accessibility to necessary supporting infrastructure such as electricity for charging devices and WiFi access. This is particularly problematic at a time when the delivery of a wide range of high use public government services are being moved to online and mobile delivery (Humphry 2014). In this way, while homeless persons 52 Nicole Gardner contribute to forms of digital labour in the sense that they produce and consume online digital content that feeds into big data systems and services they also face potentially significant limitations in their ability to access services. Overall, paying close attention to human-technology relations in urban public space varies perspectives, encourages a social comprehension of spatial production and an understanding of the dynamic nature and always in-becomingness of the urban environment (Fig. 8). The key pedagogical learnings from this approach include the student’s increased awareness of the pervasiveness, but also contextual specificity of human-technology relations. Equally, students demonstrated a more measured and less deterministic and instrumental conceptualization of technologies, and a willingness to reflect on and self-assess their own technologically-mediated behaviors. Furthermore, student survey feedback indicates that students were highly motivated by empirical methods and the opportunity to examine real-world settings, which in-turn fostered their innovative documentation and representation of human-technology-(urban)space relations, and moreover a clearer understanding of often impenetrable scholarly concepts. In short, a postphenomenological approach is a productive way to draw on empirical work as a basis for philosophical and critical reflection in ways that make philosophical and theoretical concepts more accessible, comprehensible and productive. Conclusion This chapter has discussed an approach to understanding the contemporary production of urban space that draws on postphenomenological thinking to (re)focus attention at the scale of human-technology relations. This is advanced as a productive starting point to develop a critically informed approach to the design of the built environment with and through digital and computational technologies that can be taken up across research, pedagogical, and industry contexts. Examples of urban public space observations across the LGA (Local Government Area) of the City of Sydney have been discussed with reference to Ihde’s postphenomenological framework and concepts of embodiment relations and multistability, as well as hermeneutic, alterity, and background relations. Significantly, exploring mobile/smartphone use across multiple urban public space sites evidences how human-technology relations also take on distinctive traits relative to their socio-spatiomaterial contexts of practice. Mobile and embedded digital technologies can and do play constitutive roles in the relations between people and urban space however this is not a universal experience. In some cases, humantechnology relations open up to urban space to enhance and extend experiences, and in others they can actively— and perhaps without the user knowing—push it away. Reflecting on how people’s choices, experiences, and Fig. 8 Townhall Square, Sydney, New South Wales, Australia: 3D spatial movement model, 2016. © Matthew Trilsbeck and Branko Cosic A Postphenomenological Approach to Computational Design Ethics 53 encounters in the city are mediated by interactions with various technological artifacts and systems builds a firm foundation from which to negotiate more complex questions around the implications of so-called ‘smart’ urban technological initiatives, including the (urban) subjectivities they shape as well as obscure, the ethics of data collection, data labour, data-controlled access to space and services, privacy, surveillance, and resource mobilization. The regulating force of philosophy can ground, provoke, and animate thinking around the purposes, motivations, and implications of urban technological systems, and open up to stickier, yet pertinent questions around who these strategies and systems can ultimately serve and benefit. 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