Participatory Sensing in Public Spaces

The recent convergence between low-cost technology, artform and political discourse presents a rich new design space for enabling public participation and expression. This paper explores participatory sensing as a resource for activating, authoring and provoking a milieu of urban landscapes. We envision place-based sensing that invites non-experts to move and leave modular sensors in public spaces, allowing for a range of interactions from personal sensing to more public experiences. Our study of sensor appropriation, data sharing, and public authorship across four urban communities of bicyclists, students, parents, and homeless people reveals design opportunities for merging grassroots data collection with public expression 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 throughout their daily routines over the course of one week. Our findings offer insights into public engagement, environmental sensing, and data sharing within and across four different communities, revealing design implications for participatory sensing systems as a public authoring tool for urban landscapes.

Pathogens 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).

Exploring Sensor Usage Across Four Urban Communities of Stakeholders

We define our stakeholders as any people who occupy or pass through public urban spaces, including policemen, cab drivers, pedestrians, construction workers, businessmen, etc. To gain insight into how stakeholders spanning diverse age groups, interests, urban spaces, social and economic backgrounds approach sensing and public authorship, we scoped our study around four communities, making the following assumptions about each:
• Students are a young demographic occupying spaces in and around universities, with interests that reflect similar educational backgrounds and lifestyles
• Parents form an older group, characterized by personal and family interests in spaces that revolve around children (schools, playgrounds, etc) as well as work (office, etc.) and friends (theatres, malls, etc)
• Bicyclists traverse a wide range of urban spaces with vested interests in roads, parks and traffic, among others
• The homeless are a low-income, nomadic community, with socio-political perspectives that lead to unique appropriations of technology, often overlooked by mainstream HCI literature

We hypothesize that each group embodies unique values and attachments to public spaces, and sensor placements will reveal community and individual needs. Moreover, we predict that willingness to share and act on sensor data will in part reflect participants’ involvement in their particular community, as well as their perceived role in public spaces.