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Ceci n'est pas une pipe bombe: authoring urban landscapes with air quality sensors

Published: 07 May 2011 Publication History

Abstract

Our work explores the convergence between participatory sensing, political activism and public expressions. Unlike prior research, which focuses on personal sensing, we present low-cost, networked air quality sensors, designed to be repositioned across public landscapes by communities of citizen stakeholders. Our GPS-enabled sensors report dust, exhaust, or VOC's (volatile organic compounds), along with temperature, humidity and light levels to a website that visualizes this data in real time. The sensors can be attached to a variety of surfaces serving as research probes to demarcate ('tag') public spaces with environmental concerns. We deploy our fully functional system with four urban communities - parents, bicyclists, homeless and activists, positioning our system as a tool for studying and supporting community togetherness and public activism. Our findings highlight community sharing of the physical sensors and dialogues surrounding the collected data.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI '11: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    May 2011
    3530 pages
    ISBN:9781450302289
    DOI:10.1145/1978942
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 07 May 2011

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    Author Tags

    1. participatory sensing
    2. political computing
    3. urban computing

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    CHI '11 Paper Acceptance Rate 410 of 1,532 submissions, 27%;
    Overall Acceptance Rate 6,199 of 26,314 submissions, 24%

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    • (2024)The Role of Micromobility in Environmental Monitoring: Reflections and Opportunities on the Use of Pervasive SensingIEEE Pervasive Computing10.1109/MPRV.2024.339190623:2(18-26)Online publication date: Apr-2024
    • (2023)Data-Enabled Sustainability: The Collective Work of Turning Data into Actions for Environmental CareCompanion Publication of the 2023 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing10.1145/3584931.3611278(506-511)Online publication date: 14-Oct-2023
    • (2023)Sentinel Species: Towards a Co-Evolutionary Relationship for Raising Awareness About the State of the AirProceedings of the Seventeenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction10.1145/3569009.3572748(1-13)Online publication date: 26-Feb-2023
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    • (2021)Towards Atmospheric InterfacesProceedings of the Fifteenth International Conference on Tangible, Embedded, and Embodied Interaction10.1145/3430524.3442458(1-7)Online publication date: 14-Feb-2021
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