statement of purpose

draft
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preamble
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In 2019, after having spent over 5 years helping Hive AI grow from a 6 person start-up to a 150 person company valued at $2B, I realized I wanted the next phase of my career to be focused on uniquely impactful work. To me this means work that I am uniquely well suited to perform and also has significant positive moral impact. In pursuit of this goal, I took stock of four life-long passions:

I love cities and public transit. From the frequent visits to Istanbul and New York City, then living in San Francisco, I am the person who enjoys visiting touristy areas of a city I live in just to see the vibrancy and people, in all its good and its bad.

I go crazy for interfaces and experiences that succeed at making our lives richer and bringing us joy. This is what always excited me about technology and software engineering, and is what led me to become iOS engineer.

I care deeply about understanding the impacts of our actions on the well-being of others. This is what led me to study philosophy.

I seek to examine problems as systems and view them with an interdisciplinary lens rather than in isolation. This is what led me to be interested in the System Design and Management program at MIT.

Since 2019, I have been exploring and digesting these passions through a variety of experiments, classes, conferences, and volunteer efforts. From that work, these are the two challenges I have adopted as my own:

How can we make our shared spaces more joyful?
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We should aim to build more joyful, playful, and immersive urban design. There is no reason why the places we live in and interact with every day cannot give us as much joy as the places we travel to on vacations. There are many systematic reasons why so many of our public spaces fall short of their potential, but I believe we need to shed the notion that it has to be this way.

This is not just about changing our cities to allow more imaginative urban design, but also about injecting the principles of walkability and placemaking into every step of how we plan and develop our cities. We must also build new generation of third places that bring together people from different walks of life. Libraries must be prioritized again, but we must also promote new “palaces for the people”.

I started developing MIX in an effort to explore this problem. MIX is an iOS app that uses geospatial augmented reality to create multi-user, shared experiences in public spaces. It’s just the start of my exploration into how we can use technology and spatial interfaces to innovate our urban design and placemaking.

I have been immensely inspired by Fábio Duarte’s book Urban Play, and gained a whole new appreciation for what is possible while auditing he and James Scott’s class on technology in the built environment this past semester. It would be a great opportunity to continue to learn from Professor Duarte and to help contribute to the work he and the others are doing at the Senseable City Lab.

How can we make our spatial networks more sustainable, accessible, and comfortable? or How can we make our transportation safer and less reliant on private vehicles?
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In Durham, North Carolina, 28 people are killed every year in motor vehicle collisions. Our most urgent moral need in cities is to solve the public health crisis that we have wrought with our transportation system. This means wrestling with the problems of car-dependency and an underinvestment in public transit. This also means acknowledging that traffic safety is not an isolated issue and is deeply connected to the issues of land use, housing affordability, poverty, and equity. The availability of free parking, the bollards protecting bike lanes, the curb radii used at intersections, and the distribution of affordable housing are all examples of infrastructure that directly impacts how the space in our cities is used, and in turn on the quality of life for the residents of our cities.

This problem is why I joined the Bicycle and Pedestrian Advisory Commission (BPAC) in Durham in 2021. Many of Durham’s roads are owned and maintained by the North Carolina Department of Transportation (NCDOT), and many of the improvements our residents want to see require vigilant advocacy both with City Council and with the NCDOT. Joining BPAC was my first attempt to help this cause in my hometown and learn about what problems stood in the way of seeing infrastructure improvements realized.

The large number of projects related to transportation both within DUSP and at other departments are one of the many reasons why MIT is a great place to explore this problem. The Digital Matatus project that Sarah Williams and the Civic Data Design Lab worked on sparked a thought for further investigation: what learnings from these more organic transportation systems can we adapt to our own public transit networks? Even within SDM, transportation systems are an area of deep research. The interdisciplinary environment at MIT would be a perfect place to dive deeper into new ways we can push forward the transportation networks in our cities.

How can we improve the ability of our public institutions to understand and engage with its communities?
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I believe technology, data, and AI can provide hugely valuable services to our cities. My experience with AI at Hive also gives me confidence that there are many untapped ways that AI and machine learning can be used to improve our understanding of cities. However, we must be deliberate and thoughtful about ensuring that any use of technology promotes equity and justice.

We must also find ways to improve the ways cities and local governments engage with their communities. On BPAC, I’ve seen first hand how difficult it is for residents to play an active role in the design and planning of their urban environments. We must work to restructure our existing systems to bring back trust between the many disenfranchised communities in our cities and their governments. Whether through technology or through other systemic improvements, the primary goal must be to make our cities more equitable and safe by bringing more people into the process.

Related to this, I hope to have MIX eventually be a platform for developers and planners to provide 3D designs that can be viewed in mixed reality on the site of an eventual build.

The City Scanner and Urban Sensing projects at the Senseable City Lab are two projects at DUSP that use computer vision to better understand our cities. I would be curious to see the next generation of what’s possible with hardware developed for on-device model processing.

conclusion
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My goal is to eventually start my own venture focused on solving one or multiple of these built environment related challenges. Having spent a semester at MIT already, I have seen how valuable the interdisciplinary environment would be to discovering impactful ways to improve our cities. Through my existing program I have already begun to explore the many resources available at MIT for new ventures, and I would hope to apply to the DesignX incubator if given the opportunity.

That being said, it is the balance between the theory and the practice that has made me most excited about being at MIT. I’ve especially seen this embodied at DUSP. The Roboat project at the Senseable City Lab was a quintessential example of this balance – innovation that started in the research lab that eventually led to the delivery of a real solution.

I believe we need to be innovative and push the boundaries of what is possible, but we also must be connected to real world problems and always be finding ways to implement innovations into practical solutions that help people today.

systems thinking lens

scratch

Brief overview of philosophy (200 words)

v1

In Durham, North Carolina, 7 pedestrians are killed every year in collisions with motor vehicles. (more data?).

I have always had a passion for cities and for dynamic, diverse, and well-designed built environments. I have also had a passion for good interfaces and building experiences that make people happy and joyful. Also seeking high impact needs

my core passions

cities and transportation / systems thinking and resilient change

high impact

interfaces and experiences

As my outlook on these obsessions has developed over time, I’ve realized the following

(1)

Seeing how much needless devastation our car-dependency causes

The importance of our cities for enabling equity, socio-economic mobility, and public health.

(2)

As I’ve visited more cities, Disneyland, and paid attention to the subtleties of my own environment, I realized that the interfaces that are most important to our well-being and happiness are the physical interfaces we built all around us.

(3)

Seeing and feeling the difference between a car-free street and a car-infested one, the difference between a comfortable walk with visual variety and a long walk through empty parking lots, or the difference between a train ride and a drive through traffic have all become integral parts of my outlook on cities.

My fundamental professional goal is to do uniquely optimal work. For me, this is work that, for whatever reason, I am uniquely well suited to perform and also has significant positive moral impact.

Since 2018, I have been seeking to realize this goal through a variety of experiments, classes, conferences, and volunteer efforts. Over the last two years, it has become exceedingly clear to me that my passions, skills, and values are all aligned towards one fundamental goal: making our built environments more joyful.

challenges I am interested in (300 words)
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three challenges

transportation system and land use

car dependency

public transit

walkability

most urgent moral need in cities

Why I joined BPAC

imaginative urban design (MIX)

more playful, imaginative public spaces

take advantage of technology for good (design process, data)

the role spatial interfaces can play in our cities

Why I started MIX

next generation of third places

promote diversity, social cohesion across generations, races, etc

as our work life changes, create more dynamic cities

cities should be our living room

systems note

need to understand these challenges as related within dynamic systems, wholistic perspective

Make change that is systematic and resilient

2

MIT looks at things systematically

Of all the institutions I’ve researched, MIT is the most interested in treating research areas not as standalone but as integrated systems across multiple disciplines. This is what attracted me to the System Design and Management program, and is what attracts me to doing learn and research more about city planning at MIT. The built environment of a city is not distinct from matters of policy, public health, transportation, economics, and technology. One can see this in the number of labs within the Department of Urban Studies and Planning, and the number of other research centers that also work with cities (Transportation, Media Lab, Morningside). It is this integrative approach that first gave me the excitement to begin working

Working with government

professional objectives and why MIT (300 words)
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Start my own project related to those challenges

Data analytics on cities to better understand

Desire to blend innovation and theory with real applications

Roboat

Kee Jang and Diego and Gen AI

Should not be restricted to how things are done today

But should push for realizable impact