Violet Whitney is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia GSAPP and a designer at Sidewalk Labs. She is a founding member of A-Frame, an activist organization that advocates for collaborative and equitable approaches to architectural practice. Her research focuses on how technology influences design process and urban experience. Her recent work analyzes the ways by which recommendation systems are algorithmically segregating cities and generating spatialized filter bubbles and the potential for data-driven techniques like location awareness and natural language processing to reveal unseen patterns in everyday social media, video, and images.

Her seminar, Data Mining the City, examines those apps that surreptitiously alter our perceptions of space with the aim of enabling designers to harness data analysis and computational processes for more responsible design of the built environment.