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A vehicle for research: using street sweepers to explore the landscape of environmental community action

Published:04 April 2009Publication History

ABSTRACT

Researchers are developing mobile sensing platforms to facilitate public awareness of environmental conditions. However, turning such awareness into practical community action and political change requires more than just collecting and presenting data. To inform research on mobile environmental sensing, we conducted design fieldwork with government, private, and public interest stakeholders. In parallel, we built an environmental air quality sensing system and deployed it on street sweeping vehicles in a major U.S. city; this served as a research vehicle"by grounding our interviews and affording us status as environmental action researchers. In this paper, we present a qualitative analysis of the landscape of environmental action, focusing on insights that will help researchers frame meaningful technological interventions.

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    • Published in

      cover image ACM Conferences
      CHI '09: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
      April 2009
      2426 pages
      ISBN:9781605582467
      DOI:10.1145/1518701

      Copyright © 2009 ACM

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      Publication History

      • Published: 4 April 2009

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