I have become obsessed with the impact of our surroundings on our health and happiness. Around others, I have to hold back from being the person who points out the inefficiencies of our surface parking lots, the importance of public transit frequencies, and the vital comfort of street trees. This obsession grew out of a few different realizations over the course of my life. Over my 9 years at Hive, I have realized how much human interfaces matter. Whether the goal is to optimize a user onboarding, or to
Through software I realized my passion for designing interfaces. I was always sitting with the design team, working with them to flesh out what the information architecture of our product is and how to best translate that architecture into a user interface that is simple, parseable, and makes the user happy.
It was only while living in San Francisco that I started to understand that my love of cities was something that was deeply connected to my love of interfaces. Unlike many others, I was never unhappy to go to the “touristy” areas of a city and simply walk around to experience the sights and sounds, and see the types of experiences people, usually whole families, were having.
This goal encompasses concerns of environmental sustainability, economic sustainability, and equitable accessibility. Those concerns are table stakes, and must be included in any serious attempt to make our cities better. My thesis is that those concerns are not enough, by themselves, to radically improve our cities. We can, and should, retrofit our cities to make them more equitable and sustainable, but we should also aim to move our cities forward to a future where our built environment catalyztres our well-being and happiness.
My background is in software, and I do believe technology can help our cities significantly. However, I am not an advocate for integrating technology for technology’s sake, and we must be deliberate and thoughtful about ensuring technology serves the goals we have for our societies and our cities. Anyone working closely with AI, like I have been, must understand this.
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