Siqi Zhu: Input / Output

2019 → 2021

Streets of the Future

Filed under

I led a ~$1 million R&D program at Sidewalk Labs, focused on envisioning “urban streets of the future” as both a space for the dynamic social life of the city and a platform for evolving technologies of mobility, logistics, energy, and sensing. The program brought together many domain experts and technology partners. My role spanned vision and strategy, program management and execution, design, and digital prototyping.

Designing Purposeful, Human-centered Use Cases

The program began with researching real-world needs, desired human-centered outcomes, and new technology affordances, and built purposeful use cases around these outcomes. With Colas (one of the world's largest infrastructure builders, and a key program partner) and Arup, I undertook a strategic design process that resulted in use cases built around flexible curb space management, pedestrian safety, and vehicle charging.

Skop page — I ran a series of user-centered design sprints, resulting in a number of technology use cases and concepts.

Concept Design for the Flex Curb

One of the use cases resulted in the Flex Curb, a technology concept to enable dynamic curb space use by allowing the street surface itself to communicate, using new sensing and LED pavement technologies.

Flex curb concept — The Flex Curb relies on LED pavement and in-pavement sensing to communicate dynamic rules of the curb for a variety of use cases.

Designing for Digital-Physical Systems

Designing hybrid digital-physical systems for the urban environment entail unique challenges in bringing together space, technology, and organizational form. I led the exploration of new design methods to address these challenges.

Digital system overview — I created digital integration drawings to show the holistic relationship between technologies, space, and people within a single system like the Flex Curb, and to allow disparate technology and urban design disciplines to work from a common basis-of-design

Digital-physical Prototyping

We secured a site at Brooklyn Navy Yard to bring the Flex Curb concept to life. The prototype involved a real-world installation of Colas’s Flowell LED pavement, as well as a set of APIs and software apps for visualization and control, which I prototyped.

Using data feeds from a Numina sensor, I prototyped an app for Flex Curb operators to monitor dynamic patterns of pedestrian and vehicle movement

Future Design Briefs

The “streets of the future” program generated more R&D briefs for the future: the need for a “digital ontology” of the urban public realm to allow integration among IoT-based technologies; new design paradigms for human-technology-infrastructure interactions, and finally, the need for a new kind of integrative design capacity that can work on digital-physical systems, that can effectively combine the design of spaces, UX, services, and organizations with technology assessment and prototyping.