Re-calibrating DIY: Testing digital participation across dust sensors, fry pans and environmental pollution (original) (raw)
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Citizen sensing, or the use of low-cost and accessible digital technologies to monitor environments, has contributed to new types of environmental data and data practices. Through a discussion of participatory research into air pollution sensing with residents of northeastern Pennsylvania concerned about the effects of hydraulic fracturing, we examine how new technologies for generating environmental data also give rise to new problems for analysing and making sense of citizen-gathered data. After first outlining the citizen data practices we collaboratively developed with residents for monitoring air quality, we then describe the data stories that we created along with citizens as a method and technique for composing data. We further mobilise the concept of ‘just good enough data’ to discuss the ways in which citizen data gives rise to alternative ways of creating, valuing and interpreting datasets. We specifically consider how environmental data raises different concerns and possi...
In the last ten years, a growing range of products, gadgets, toys and new initiatives has made it possible for people to collect data about the physical world around them, share this information and create novel data sets. The rise of quotidian sensors promises to democratize science, but raises complex questions about what science requires in addition to data, and whether access to sensors turns cities into smart cities, journalists into data analysts and citizens into scientists. We identify and explore five paradigms for the use of sensors by everyday citizens: smart cities, sensor journalism, crowdsourced journalism, citizen sensing and citizen science. We include two case studies that complicate aspirations for citizen sensors as a tool for empowerment. One case is Safecast, a start-up that formed after the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster in Japan which designed a highly accurate radiation sensor in order to monitor radiation levels in the environment and verify whether the government was publishing accurate information. Our second case considers the coquí, a DIY water conductivity sensor that D'Ignazio has been using to teach journalism students about water quality. From these case studies, we see evidence that individuals empowered by sensors are best understood not as citizen scientists or crowdsourcing subjects, but as effective and empowered citizens. We posit that Michael Schudson’s “monitorial citizen” may be the most apt paradigm to consider for the emancipatory potential of popular sensing. From the International Handbook of Media Literacy Education.
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Social Studies of Science, 2018
In Madrid, as in many European cities, air pollution is known about and made accountable through techno-scientific monitoring processes based on data, and the toxicity of the air is defined through epidemiological studies and made political through policy. In 2009, Madrid's City Council changed the location of its air quality monitoring stations without notice, reducing the average pollution of the city and therefore provoking a public scandal. This scandal challenged the monitoring process, as the data that used to be the evidence of pollution could not be relied on anymore. To identify the characteristics of some of the diverse forms of public's participation that emerged, I route theories of environmental sensing from STS and feminist theory through the notion of attuned sensing. Reading environmental sensing through processes of attunement expands the ways in which toxicity can be sensed outside of quantitative data. This mode of sensing recognizes how the different spontaneous attunements to and with air pollution and the scandal acknowledged Madrid's chemical infrastructure, rendering visible qualitative conditions of toxicity. This mode of sensing politicized the toxicity of the air not through management or policy making, nor only through established forms environmental activism, but through contagion and accumulation of the different forms of public participation. All together, they made air pollution a matter of public concern. They also redistributed the actors, practices and objects that make the toxicity not only knowable, but also accountable, and most importantly, they opened up spaces for citizen intervention.
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Inspired by contemporary visions of the omniscience of data, this note questions the idea that data are raw, untreated, numeric replications of the world, available for immediate use at any particular moment in time. Instead, I argue that data are produced by different sociomaterial practices and therefore are neither raw replications of the world nor available instantaneously. Based on ethnographic research on environmental monitoring, this note explores the practices of filtering massive amounts of environmental sensor data produced in European cities in recent years. First, it reveals how the ongoing efforts to produce environmental data on air quality are enabled through increasing implementation of sensor technologies in the urban realm, whereby the assemblages of human and nonhuman actors and their interplay are unfolded. Second, the examination of the sociotechnical ‘sensing’ of air quality within different spatiotemporal techniques of filtering inevitably casts doubt on the ...
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2019
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Sociological Review, 2019
The air is, in many urban contexts, polluted. Governments and institutions monitor particles and gas concentrations to better understand how they perform in the light of air quality guidance and legislation, and to make predictions in terms of future environmental health targets. The visibility of these data is considered crucial for citizens to manage their own health, and a proliferation of new informational forms and apps have been created to achieve this. And yet, beyond everyday decisions (when to use a mask or when to do sports outdoors), it is not clear whether current methods of engaging citizens produce behavioural change or stronger citizen engagement with air pollution. Drawing on the design, construction and ethnography of an urban infrastructure to measure, make visible and remediate particulate matter (PM2.5) through a water vapour cloud that we installed at the Seoul Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism 2017, we examined the effects and affects of producing a public space that allows for physical interaction with data. In Yellow Dust, data from PM2.5 were translated into mist, the density of which was responsive to the number of particles suspended in the air. Data were made sense/ible by the changing conditions of the air surrounding the infrastructure, which can be experienced in embodied, collective and relational ways: what we call 'molecular intimacies'. By reflecting on how the infrastructure facilitated new modes of sensing data, we consider how 'data intimacies' can re-specify action by producing different forms of engagement with air pollution.
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This article presents the results of the qualitative research conducted on Polish users of the Sensor.Community network. Different types of motivation behind the decision to engage in the collection of air quality data are discussed. Users’ motives have been found to result predominantly from the concern for the health and safety of their loved ones, as well as the need to control air quality (and ultimately the quality of life) in their immediate environment (home and neighbourhood). Users do not display civic behaviour such as working for the local community. Three factors have been proposed to explain this status quo. First, the motives related to health and safety, as opposed to motives behind seeking a resolution to an environmental problem at the local level, may contribute to the solidification of individualistic attitudes. Second, Sensor.Community is organised in a way that does not promote a greater involvement from the network organisers in the development of the initiativ...
Participatory Sensing in Public Spaces: Activating Urban Surfaces with Sensor Probes
Recent convergence between low-cost technology, artform and political discourse presents a new design space for enabling public participation and expression. We explore non-experts' use of place-based, modular sensors to activate, author and provoke urban landscapes. Our work with communities of bicyclists, students, parents, and homeless people suggests design opportunities for merging grassroots data collection with public expressions and activism. Members of each community were given probes that represent the measurement of exhaust, smog, pathogens, chemicals, noise or dust, and asked to engage with them as fully functional sensors over the course of one week. Our findings offer insights into participation, environmental sensing, and data sharing within and across four different communities, revealing design implications for future sensing systems as instruments of social currency and political change. Figure 1. Pathogen sensor on toilet placed by parent (top right), all 6 sensors attached to bike while passing a bridge (top left), dust sensor on construction site fence placed by homeless (bottom right), and dust and noise sensors placed in computer lab by student (bottom left).