Urban Meteorology and Data Climates
Ben Hooker, Pedro Sepúlveda Sandoval, Bill Gaver
Interaction Design Research Studio
Royal College of Art, Kensington Gore, London SW7 2EU
b.hooker@rca.ac.uk, pedro.sepulveda@mac.com, w.gaver@rca.ac.uk
All too often, profound hypotheses emerging from
scientific research fail to receive deserved interest
outside the scientific community or, if they do, are
oversimplified and hyped-up by the popular media.
This is arguably the case with environmental science when dealing with an issue such as climate
change prediction. Here there seems to be a particularly unsatisfactory, unconstructive relationship
between the scientists who do the research and the
average non-scientist citizen:
“It is easy to forget how wide a gulf separates
thinking and doing when it comes to the environment. For 30 years now, scientists, thinktanks, governments and global organisations
have all been measuring and analysing the
'eco' problem. Naturally, given the extent of
the problem, they’ve produced a stream of
ghastly projections. As a result, eco-gloom is
now a dark cloud in all our skies. But do we
change our behaviour? Or do we simply take
the attitude that if it rains, it rains, if the world
ends, it ends.”
John Thackara http://museum.doorsofperception.com/doors/doors3/transcripts/Thackara.html
the city and average these readings over time and
space. Averaging is used to avoid potentially
alarming data 'glitches' caused by, for instance, an
isolated malfunctioning device or a particularly
polluting vehicle next to a sensor at the instant a
reading is taken.
Our approach, however, is to design for the emergence of an urban landscape that includes multiple sensors, overlapping networks and mobile
devices. We have been looking at less official
sources of pollution data and finding appropriate
methods of disseminating their ‘live’readings. We
have been exploring ways to visualise this spatial
data. For example:
– localised pollution ‘ticker tape’ bulletins
attached to existing street furniture in the city
– a graphic toolkit for the production of local
pollution ‘weather maps’for use by local media
– location-based mobile phone services which
display the data-streams from user-selected
pollutant sensors alongside live advice from
various electronic ‘consultants’.
As a design team based at the Royal College of Art,
working within a larger Interdisciplinary Research
Collaboration (Advanced Grid Interfaces for
Environmental Science in the Lab and in the Field)
we are seeking to link localised pollution data with
information about climate change in the Antarctic
to create compelling ‘live’ public experiences that
will lead to a more sophisticated public understanding of the cause and effects of pollution and,
in turn, an increased awareness of the role and
techniques of today’s environmental scientists.
We have found that considering mobile phones as
a delivery platform for live pollution-related content is a particularly fruitful line of investigation.
The arrangement of radio base stations used to
provide network coverage provide a useful infrastructure to deliver particular pieces of media to
people in a particular location (i.e. everyone within a particular mobile phone cell). Furthermore,
the density of mobile phone cells is higher in
more built-up areas, affording a better spatial resolution in areas where pollution pockets are likely to occur due to reduced air flow and high levels of traffic.
Currently we are focussing on urban pollution
monitoring. Flows of pollutants around the city are
very complex due to factors such as amount and
speed of traffic, building shapes and density,
weather conditions etc. Existing public pollutionlevel displays (on civic internet sites or community information screens in shopping precincts) typically take data from many pollution sensors across
The complexity of the invisible ‘information
landscape’ of radio waves carrying digital signals
is increased by the multiple phone networks and
other wireless networks that co-exist in the same
physical space. A given location in the city can
be considered to have a specific mixture of wireless connectivity potential – what we have called
a Data Climate.
We are experimenting with designing publicly
broadcast 'channels' of live, very localised pollution data, employing data collected from low-quality portable sensors or extrapolated using speculative computer models – techniques that would, justifiably, be rejected for compiling existing 'official'
pollution maps. Crucially, parallel to publishing
very localised pollution data, would be information
about the characteristics of the pollution sensors
and the computation models that are being
employed to achieve this data.
Thus, the scenario for which we are designing is set
in a richly heterogeneous city of buildings, people,
cars and invisible Data Climates. We add to this the
ever increasing number and types of of environmental sensors – fixed, portable, public, private,
LAYERS OF AN IDEAL
(HYPOTHETICAL) CITY...
Public information
display boards
(showing today’s
pollution reading)
Matrix of governmentmaintained pollution
sensors
A uniform cellular
phone network
The planned,
physical city
Air canyons between
the blocks of buildings
(containing airborne
pollutants)
cheap and disposable, expensive and calibrated –
all fitted with ‘data pumps’to upload their readings
to a network to allow wireless access out in ‘the
field’. Finally, we imagine moving through this
city with a hypothetical mobile phone-like device
that allows the user to plug in and out of many different networks as the device is immersed in a
series of different Data Climates. Aside from providing higher resolution – albeit more unstable and
unregulated – 'pollution maps' of the city, this
approach encourages people to draw their own
conclusions about the causes and effects of pollution by partly exposing the processes of scientific
investigation and pollution prediction.
Over the next few pages we show some annotated
sketches from our investigation so far...
BUT PERHAPS CITIES
ARE MORE LIKE THIS...
This city is a place where:
- information does not come from one ‘official’ source
- there is a constant battle between ‘top-down’ planning and ‘bottom-up’ building
- multiple networks co-exist and overlap
- scientists disagree with each other
Airborne
pollutants
‘Public’
display?
A dense and
complex
‘information
landscape’
created by
arrangements
of sensors and
transmitters
The physical
mass of the city
... the changing phone screen as you move through the city ...
Consider a mobile phone device that does not have an exclusive service contract with one
network provider; a phone that can ‘see’ all available wireless networks. Moving through
the city, the device is immersed in many different networks as it passes in and out of different signal ranges — public and private networks around offices and coffee shops, ‘data
advertisement’ radio beacons, rival phone companies, other mobile devices with peer-topeer networking...
AN UNREGULATED ‘MARKET’
OF ENVIRONMENTAL DATA
SERVICE PROVIDERS?
Alongside the devices and
protocols which establish wireless
networks (Mobile phone masts,
W-LAN hubs, wireless network
expansion cards, Bluetooth, etc.),
new software applications are
appearing which manage the
information that these networks
carry — for example, web-based
applications for sending the same
text messages to all mobile
phones in a user-defined group in
a particular location.
How might the potential link of
environmental sensors to
location-based wireless
information services appear?
We are working with our partners
from the University of
Nottingham, University College
London and Glasgow University
to develop these ideas. Data from
a collection of portable pollution
sensors will be crafted for display
on mobile devices to test the
experience and use of the
scenareos we are considering.
Example environmental
data-channels — some
city-wide services, some
local broadcasts