The "Quants", their Normalizations and their Abstractions

In the latest Situated Technologies pamphlet “A synchronicity: Design Fictions for Asynchronous Urban Computing“, Julian Bleecker and Nicolas Nova discuss the notion of “real-time cities” shifting discussion away from the hygienist model of efficiency towards unscripting the unexpected and cultivating the unusual. In a world of “open data initiatives” and “smart cities”, I have a lot of sympathy for their discourse that consider computing in an urban setting not be about data and algorithms, but people and their activities. They critique the hold of quants on the representation of the city arguing that “our relationship to the spatial environment should only be based on statistical analysis or mediated by computations”:

One characteristic of these sorts of mass city visualizations is that they operate at an abstract level and normalize the individual, averaging out all the atomic units—the people—of contemporary cities. Another dimension that is lost is the history and culture, which are not part of these representations.

Of course, the “quant” failure in the financial markets makes this idea of our reliance on spreadsheets, quantification and computation even more poignant.

And these numbers guys on Wall Street—the “quants”—were going berserk with their numbers. They were creating such byzantine computational number-crunching algorithms that no one knew how it all worked. The quants, with their theoretical mathematics PhDs, had so divorced themselves with their abstracting tier of calculation that it all was destined to collapse.

In my thesis, I intended to downplay the role of data and the unique reliance on data scientists, arguing for mixed quantitative and qualitative approaches to capture urban dynamics and support the design of urban services (see The Other Point of View). It also implies integrating other practices to question the hold of engineers, accounts and architects on the design of our cities. Julian and Nicolas use the following terms:

I suppose this is where designers could participate if they sat at the same table as the engineers and accountants and brought additional sensibilities that can vector interpretations and semantics differently, away from the up-and-to-the right graphs of instrumental progression to bigger, faster and cheaper.