A Labor of Love and Friendship:

We trust algorithms to design our cities because we think they are objective. Math doesn’t have an opinion, right? ”Wrong,” says Philip Plowright, PhD, professor of architecture and chair of the Department of Design, in Lawrence Technological University’s College of Architecture and Design (CoAD).

The Backstory First

The newly published book, The Hidden Lives of Algorithms: Geometry and Social Meaning in Architecture, represents the final collaboration between two distinct minds: Plowright, a design theorist and architect focused on how humans feel and think in space, and the late Silvio Carta, PhD, a computational designer, engineer, and architect who understood the digital logic of the machine. “This work, dedicated to Dr. Carta, bridges the gap between the ‘soft’ world of human cognition and the ‘hard’ world of data science.”

Several years ago, after Plowright had keynoted a conference in Cambridge, UK, Carta approached him and said, “I want to write a little book on algorithms with you, like the ones you have been doing for design principles.” Those “little books on design principles”  include Making Architecture Through Being Human and Urban Design Made by Humans: A Handbook of Design Ideas, the latter co-authored with Anirban Adhya, PhD, LTU associate professor of architecture and urban design. That request by Carta began an intense, almost daily conversation and a friendship that formed the basis of the book.

About Hidden Lives

In The Hidden Lives of Algorithms: Geometry and Social Meaning in Architecture, co-authors Plowright and Carta argue that every time a software draws a line, it makes a social decision. “Crucially, this book functions as a translation manual for students and designers. It systematically walks the reader through the mathematical construction of these algorithms — demystifying the raw logic of the code — and then links that logic directly to the embodied developmental meanings we use to navigate the world,” Plowright said.

The authors demonstrate how a “formal language” (like the vector math of a Voronoi diagram, which partitions a plane into regions based on distance to a set of points) attempts to solve a problem of efficiency, but in doing so, often fails to speak the “natural language” of human inference. The book teaches students to see the “hidden opinions” inside the software that shapes our lives. Plowright said, “As we hand over more design work to AI and generative tools, we are accidentally automating social bias. If we don’t teach designers to bridge the gap between ‘how the machine calculates’ and ‘how the human feels,’ we are at risk of automating exclusion, embedding bias into the very streets we walk on, without even realizing it.

“We tend to think of the software designing our cities as objective. We assume that because an algorithm uses math, it must be neutral. But people have to live in the world that these algorithms create through reductive mathematical processes.”

Plowright and Carta explored a critical oversight in modern design: Rather than being neutral, geometry has quite a few “opinions.” The authors say every time a piece of software provides a form based on computational logic, that logic creates a lived consequence.

“If we don’t teach designers to bridge the gap between ‘how the machine calculates’ and ‘how the human feels,’ we are at risk of automating exclusion, embedding bias into the very streets we walk on, without even realizing it.”
– Philip Plowright, PhD, professor of architecture and chair of the Department of Design

The “Sticky” Concept

According to Plowright, the core argument of the book is that architects and designers need to apply the “ruining someone’s day” test to the implementation of their code.

It’s easy for a designer to look at a series of geometric shapes in a software package and see a clean, efficient layout. It’s much harder to see the frustration of the person living inside the outcome of that layout. The book challenges architects and tech developers to stop looking at the code and start looking at the consequences.

In “Hidden Lives,” the three seemingly straightforward concepts of a line, a circle, and a point are shown to be significantly more nuanced and viewed through the lens of the human experience. In social terms, a line is not just a connector between points but dictates movement. It controls who has access to resources, who gets to move where and who is blocked. If an algorithm draws a “short” line that cuts through a community, it prioritizes speed over neighborhood cohesion. Likewise, a circle doesn’t just create a boundary but creates a decision of who’s inside and who’s outside, which is a shortcut for ‘us’ versus ‘them.’ Finally, a point is not a dot but acts as a focus of agency and a focus of attention, deciding what matters and what is ignored. While an algorithm may optimize a point for “clarity,” it often creates environments of surveillance where people feel watched rather than safe.

The Collaboration Lives On

“Silvio passed away after we had finished all the research and a couple of chapters. I had to finish the book alone, completing it as an homage to Silvio, a way of honoring our friendship and bringing the ideas that he loved to others,” Plowright said. Carta did not see its completion as he passed away in March 2025, though his legacy lives on through the teachings of “Hidden Lives.”

The book, published January 29 by Routledge, is now available.