receiver magazine      #21 | Space is the place!

Anne Galloway recently completed a PhD in sociology and anthropology at Carleton University, Ottawa, Canada, which involved conducting an ethnographic study of the design of mobile and pervasive technologies. She is interested in connections between technological, spatial and cultural practices, and her current research explores design as a social and cultural activity and asks how social and cultural relations are designed. Galloway’s work has been presented to international audiences in technology, design, art, architecture, social and cultural studies, as well as published in a variety of books and journals. She currently teaches design and computation arts at Concordia University in Montréal, Canada. In her receiver contribution she takes a close look at community mapping and sensing projects, and points out both the opportunities and challenges for activism made possible by locative technologies.

Website: http://www.purselipsquarejaw.org

Illustration by Nadine Redlich ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

We often think of mobile technologies simply in terms of their communication capabilities, but their increasing ability to trace our movements and collect information about the spaces through which we pass, can also make it easier for people to keep track of the places and things that matter most to them. From geo-visualisations and mapping mash-ups, to the mobile geospatial web and location-based services, people’s relationships to places (and each other) are changing.

Community mapping and sensing projects that use commonly available consumer electronics as environmental measurement devices, enable people to collect and view a wide array of location-based data. As a form of public science, such projects stand to reinvigorate environmentally focused civic engagement. However, given public concerns around environmental risks and their connections to technological progress, I believe that this kind of active citizenship should promote more critical reflection on the values and goals of the very projects that expect to create such profound changes in these domains, and carefully consider the limits of its own power.


Urban sensing

Over the past few years major global industry players have increasingly partnered with university researchers and artists around the world to investigate the potential of large-scale and publicly accessible environmental sensing projects. Historically, environmental monitoring has been limited to fixed sensors, embedded in particular locations, under centralised control. In contrast, what Jeff Burke and his colleagues at UCLA call “participatory sensing”, or the ability of individuals to act as sensor nodes and come together with other people in order to form sensor networks, emphasises a more grassroots and decentralised approach to urban sensing.

For example, the US-based artists, activists and technologists of Preemptive Media have been exploring how both people and animals can be used as technologically enabled environmental sensors:

AIR (Area’s Immediate Reading) http://www.pm-air.net/index.php

“AIR is a public, social experiment in which people are invited to use Preemptive Media’s portable air monitoring devices to explore their neighborhoods and urban environments for pollution and fossil fuel burning hotspots … While AIR is designed to be a tool for individuals and groups to self identify pollution sources, it also serves as a platform to discuss energy politics and their impact on the environment, health and social groups in specific regions.”

Moving beyond people for data collection, Preemptive Media’s PigeonBlog (→ realtime map http://pigeonblog.mapyourcity.net/map/index.php) project recruits homing pigeons and equips them with sensors that relay data on-line and allow it to be plotted and visualised, in real-time, to anyone with an internet connection. By focussing on air pollution, both of these projects take up pervasive computing’s familiar mandate to make the invisible visible and demonstrate locative media’s interest in collective political action. Embodying what sociologist Bruno Latour has called “collectives of humans and non-humans”, AIR and PigeonBlog reconfigure political networks in terms of their capacity to collect and disseminate sensor data.

UK-based creative studio Proboscis, in collaboration with university researchers, has similar interests in using sensor technologies to enable public action around environmental issues:

Robotic Feral Public Authoring http://socialtapestries.net/feralrobots

“The Robotic Feral Public Authoring project seeks to bridge the fields of experimental robotics and pervasive place-based public authoring. It combines low-cost robotics with geo-annotation in an innovative way, to develop a novel approach for galvanising social activism, on a local level, around environmental issues. By adapting commercially available toy robots with a variety of sensors and uploading the readings to a spatial annotation database for visualisation, we have explored new ways in which the exclusiveness of pollution sensing and robotics can be dispelled, and a new sense of empowerment promoted for grass roots communities.”

Proboscis follows up on these ideas with Snout, a project that embeds sensor technologies in carnival-inspired costumes and encourages communities to “scavenge” free on-line mapping services to help put the data to use. Moving more explicitly into the realm of potential political action, the Robotic Feral Public Authoring and Snout projects make direct connections between the public’s ability to collect scientific data and the ability to effect social change. Similar to the Preemptive Media projects described above, these interventions focus on enabling local, non-expert knowledge production and sharing.

Another example with a pronounced emphasis on distributed environmental monitoring as a form of public science and political action, can be seen in the Common Sense research project. A collaboration between US-based university and industry partners, the project website employs clever wordplay and conjures revolutionary thinking by using Thomas Paine’s famous 1776 political tract, Common Sense, as its background image.

Common Sense http://citizensensing.org

“The Common Sense team is developing mobile environmental sensing platforms to support community action and citizen science. An increasing number of mobile devices have the potential to become personal environmental sensors. To this end, we are developing sensing platforms that allow individuals to collect environmental information [and] software applications that allow people to analyze, share and discuss this information, in order to influence environmental regulations and policies. We aim to develop new communication paradigms that empower communities to produce credible information that can be understood by non-experts, in order to effect positive societal change.”

Most recently working with City of San Francisco street-sweepers to map the city’s air quality on a street-by-street basis, the project is part of a larger effort to enable what the researchers call “citizen science”. By turning mobile phones into sensing devices, the researchers hope that public understandings of science and environmental issues will be improved, scientists will have access to larger and more detailed data sets, and people will be better prepared to participate in government and policy making activities.

Citizens as sensors / sensors as citizens

What all these exploratory projects have in common is a shared expectation that mobile sensing technologies can be effectively used to effect social or political change. Despite the timeliness and politically progressive nature of such endeavours, by focussing on environmental data as products or objects that can be used for future political action, all the projects shift attention away from the present politics of the data collection and interpretation processes.

For example, projects in this domain rarely, if ever, question the environmental or political impacts of the technologies they seek to employ for environmental and political activism. For example, the United Nations now estimates that almost 50 million tonnes of electronic waste are discarded each year. While the environmental costs of toxic e-waste are substantial and can be added to the environmental impact of manufacturing new electronics, the problem is exacerbated by a variety of related practices that disadvantage developing nations. While all of the projects discussed above advocate using technologies for socially, politically and environmentally positive ends, they also implicitly support existing consumption practices in the developed world, and hide the role that technological progress has played in creating the very problems they seek to improve.

When active citizenship requires access to particular technologies, people without access are effectively excluded from the democratic process. While it may be accurate to point out the ubiquity of mobile phone use, it is also worthwhile to account for how new technological applications stand to impact those who are absent from typical-use scenarios. Furthermore, while promoting public science is undeniably a laudable goal, it is also a rather complex one. Despite the emphasis on local knowledge production in such projects, the data collected still speak the global language of science. By implicitly supporting the notion that scientific data are the appropriate types of evidence a citizen can collect, political action relies on conformity to existing structures of knowledge and power. In other words, local knowledge is primarily configured as a matter of location, rather than definition, and the transformative power of the sensor citizen is limited to pre-existing interests. Finally, this complexity is further compounded by the capacity (or incapacity) of people to make sense of the data collected, not to mention their willingness (or unwillingness) to act as data collectors in the first place.



Emotional mapping

Now, what if technologically enabled activism was explicitly more playful, or fun, than simply collecting scientific data? Certainly PigeonBlog offers an unexpected twist on data collection, and both Snout and Robotic Feral Public Authoring emphasise the value of embedding these activities within existing cultural practices that are more creative and community-oriented. Yet, what if such objective or rational evidence was supplemented with more subjective or emotional evidence? What if sensing technologies were also used to record people’s fears or concerns about particular environments? And what if the public environmental record mapped our pleasures and joys too?

Since 2004, over 1500 people around the world have participated in the Bio Mapping project to create “emotion maps” of their cities and neighbourhoods. While all the projects mentioned above allow non-experts to collect data and share it in ways they find meaningful, the Bio Mapping project is unique in its desire and ability to collect more ambiguous data.

BIO MAPPING http://www.biomapping.net/

“Bio Mapping is a community mapping project in which … participants are wired up with an innovative device which records the wearer’s Galvanic Skin Response (GSR), which is a simple indicator of the emotional arousal in conjunction with their geographical location. People re-explore their local area by walking the neighbourhood with the device and on their return a map is created which visualises points of high and low arousal. By interpreting and annotating this data, communal emotion maps are constructed that are packed full of personal observations which show the areas that people feel strongly about and truly visualise the social space of a community.”

Since the project’s GSR device measures intensity of emotion, without being able to identify if an emotion is negative or positive, people must more actively interpret the collected data. Rather than treating data as a final product that can be used in particular ways, these data act more like materials that people can shape and reshape as they see fit. Not only does Bio Mapping locate individual bodies in shared environments, but in doing so it supports the collection and production of different kinds of knowledge. In turn, the political action it affords is arguably less normative and prescriptive, but no less effective.

Ultimately, I believe that researchers, artists and citizens should be encouraged to experiment with new ways of using mobile technologies, and to explore new forms of political action. Indeed, given the growing impact of global climate change, our pressing need for environmental activism opens up a productive space for critical intervention, and all of the projects discussed in this essay do just that. However, I also believe that we need to approach our activities in this area with a clear understanding of their boundaries and biases. Because, in the end, I believe that it will take working through – or around – these limitations in order to effect the most profound and lasting changes.

This article was written for receiver

Contact: Anne Galloway