Udayan Tandon

Udayan Tandon

Ph.D. Student at UC San Diego, Department of Computer Science
IPE Fellow
3C Fellow

Publications

Can Smartness Fail? The Charisma of High Tech as Class Politics

Published in Proceedings of the ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference, 2025

Recorded Talk

This paper analyzes how smart city infrastructures are planned, implemented, and scaled, even when they fail Understanding how these processes unfold is critical for technology researchers committed to creating equitable public infrastructures. In this paper, we focus on an urban smart mobility solution called FRED, put in place to increase connectivity within downtown San Diego. We analyze it through a decade of public meetings, contract renewals, planning documents, and media coverage. Our findings show that FRED’s intervention was a cover for scaling neoliberal transit privatization in San Diego. This is facilitated by the “charisma” of smart mobility technology – framed as clean and green, app-based, algorithmically optimized, and innovative – to upper-class actors like tech entrepreneurs, property developers, business leaders, and city officials. Reflecting on these insights, we explore alternative strategies that could have produced different outcomes and discuss how our case study informs new design sensibilities in civic contexts.

Recommended Citation: Udayan Tandon, Lilly Irani, Sarah E Fox, and Vera Khovanskaya. 2025. Can Smartness Fail? The Charisma of High Tech as Class Politics. In Proceedings of the 2025 ACM Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS ‘25). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 982–998. https://doi.org/10.1145/3715336.3735732

🏆 Hostile Ecologies: Navigating the Barriers to Community-Led Innovation

Published in Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (CSCW 2022), 2022 (🏆 Honorable mention for being top 4% of all papers)

Recorded Talk

This paper describes how the contemporary technology innovation ecology is hostile to community-driven design. These hostilities are important to understand if we want to intervene in the policy landscape of technology innovation to support viable alternatives to big tech consolidation and more democratic ways of developing and maintaining technology. We contribute a thick description of the hostile ecologies faced by transportation workers, community organizers, and allied technology researchers as they work toward building a cooperatively-owned taxi business with a digital dispatching technology. Our findings show that the hostile innovation ecology manifests as constrained access to resources, an inequitable regulatory framework, diminished agency in the software design process, and limits to the will of our community partners. We discuss the paths toward innovation for United Taxi Workers San Diego as compared with transportation network companies (e.g. Lyft, Uber) in terms of access to funding, regulation, labor, expertise, and market. We argue that a critical examination of institutions and policies in the innovation ecology is a necessary step toward charting fair, equitable, and community-strengthening pathways for technology innovation in the future.

Recommended Citation: Udayan Tandon, Vera Khovanskaya, Enrique Arcilla, Mikaiil Haji Hussein, Peter Zschiesche, and Lilly Irani. 2022. Hostile Ecologies: Navigating the Barriers to Community-Led Innovation. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact. 6, CSCW2, Article 443 (November 2022), 26 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3555544

An alternative version of this paper titled “Barriers to community-led real utopias: A case study of taxis in San Diego” was presented at The Beyster Symposium ‘22 and Society for the Advancement of Socio-Economics ‘22. The PDF is available here.

Policy Reports

Transportation for Smart and Equitable Cities: Integrating Taxis and Mass Transit for Access, Emissions Reduction, and Planning

Policy report synthesizing independent research on impacts of transportation network companies (TNCs) such as Uber and Lyft on local safety, economies, and social equity. Outline of a vision for creating publicly regulated and supported “first mile last mile” transportation” that overcomes these issues.

Recommended Citation: Irani, Lilly, Hussein, Mikaiil, Zschiesche, Peter, Tandon, Udayan, Arcilla, Enrique, Hickman, Louise, Goldsmith, Montana, Singh, Simrandeep, & Khovanskaya, Vera. (2021). Transportation for Smart and Equitable Cities: Integrating Taxis and Mass Transit for Access, Emissions Reduction, and Planning. Zenodo. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5225091

Past Publications