RE: REempower and REcycle

This paper briefl y presents two concepts of “RE” (1) re-empowering individuals using personal mobile technology reconstructed as measurement instruments and (2) re-cycle as a design constraint for extending a product’s usable lifetime. In the fi rst example we demonstrate the integration of simple low-cost, low-power air quality sensors attached to a mobile phone. In the re-cycle case, we demonstrate the extended re-use of mobile phones using them as toolkits for new duties. 1 Super-powers and Super-senses Our mobile devices are more than just personal communication tools. They are globally networked, speak the lingua franca of the city (SMS, Bluetooth, MMS), and are becoming the dominant urban processor. We need to shatter our understanding of them as phones and celebrate them in their new role as measurement instruments. Our desire is to provide our mobile devices with new “super-senses” and abilities by enabling a wide range of physical sensors to be easily attached and used by anyone, especially non-experts. We argue there are two indisputable facts about our future mobile devices: (1) that they will be equipped with more sensing and processing capabilities and (2) that they will also be driven by an architecture of participation and democracy that encourages users to add value to their tools and applications as they use them. We have already seen the early emergence of sensors on mobile devices such as Apple’s Nike+iPod Sport Kit (music player + pedometer), Apple’s iPhone (mobile phone + proximity sensor and accelerometer), Nokia’s 5500 (mobile phone + pedometer), Samsung’s S310 (mobile phone + 6 axis accelerometer), and LG Electronics LGLP4100 (mobile phone + breathalyzer). Similarly, we have seen the “Web 2.0” phenomenon embrace an approach to generating and distributing web content characterized by open communication, decentralization of authority, freedom to share and re-use, and “the market as a conversation”. What happens when individual mobile devices are augmented with novel sensing technologies such as noise pollution, air quality, UV levels, water quality, etc? We claim that it will shatter our understanding of these devices as simply communication tools (a.k.a. phones) and celebrates them in their new role as measurement instruments. We envision a wide range of novel physical sensors attached to mobile devices, empowering everyday non-experts with new “supersenses” and abilities. It radically alters the current models of civic government as sole data gatherer and decision maker by empowering everyday citizens to collectively participate in super-sampling their life, city, and environment. These new mobile “sensing instruments” will promote everyday citizens to uncover and visualize unseen elements of their own everyday experiences. As networked devices, they repositions individuals as producers, consumers, and remixers of a vast openly shared public data set. By empowering others to easily create, report, and compare their own personal measurements, a new citizen driven model of civic government and technology needs can emerge out of these important new personal and community driven dialogues about our cities, neighborhoods, and mobile lifestyles. The technological debate radically expands from beyond simply how to design a few functional mobile applications that satisfy the needs of thousands of people (such as a location service, a friend fi nder Eric Paulos • Ian Smith • RJ Honicky RE: REempower and REcycle Eric Paulos Intel Research Berkeley Ian Smith Intel Research Seattle RJ Honicky UC Berkeley social networking system, or a mapping overlay tool) to how thousands of mobile individuals can author, share, and remix publicly sampled data into a wide variety of more personally meaningful mobile experiences and tools. Large scale services, while tremendously important, often suffer from lowest common denominator effects as they seek to make a single system satisfy the needs of everyone. We see our future urban technologies as a mixture of large scale systems and personally customized small tools. We are interested in exploring this new model of citizen authoring, public sharing, and personal remixing of urban life driven by personal experiences and measurements of the city. The result is an urban technological future that hopefully conveys personal meaning to citizens and a more informed and responsive civic government unburdened from its reliance on low resolution, generic, and fi ltered data driven solutions. By elevating everyday citizens into the role of data collector, commentator, and policy maker, we hope to directly empowering people to participate in the authorship of their emerging digital era Metapolis [1] with personally meaningful technological objects that matter. 2 Participatory Urbanism In the spirit of Urban Computing, Participatory Urbanism is the open authoring, sharing, and remixing of new or existing urban technologies marked by, requiring, or involving participation, especially affording the opportunity for individual citizen participation, sharing, and voice. Participatory Urbanism promotes new styles and methods for individual citizens to become proactive in their involvement with their city, neighborhood, and urban self refl exivity. Examples of Participatory Urbanism include but are not limited to: providing mobile device centered hardware toolkits for non-experts to become authors of new everyday urban objects, generating individual and collective needs based dialogue tools around the desired usage of urban green spaces, or empowering citizens to collect and share air quality data measured with sensor enabled mobile devices. Participatory Urbanism builds upon a large body of related projects where citizens act as agents of change. There is a long history of such movements from grassroot neighborhood watch campaigns to political revolutions. Our primary motivation from an urban standpoint comes from the insights of leading urban practitioners such as Jason Coburn, Jane Jacobs, and the sociologist Ulrich Beck. Our work leverages Coburn’s “street science” framework which emphasizes local urban insights to improve scientifi c inquiry and environmental health policy and decision making. Coburn underscores the importance of local (community) knowledge as “the scripts, images, narratives, and understandings we use to make sense of the world in which we live” [2]. Even more emphatically he states that a community’s “political power hinges in part on its ability to manipulate knowledge and to challenge evidence presented in support of particular policies”. While such local knowledge and community based practices are sometimes labeled as romantic or populist, Cobun insists that such views overlook the structural and global dimensions of problem solving for urban communities. Coburn believes that “street science” leverages community power imbalances, and can increase agency or decision maker understanding of a community’s claims, thereby potentially increasing public trust. He insists that such local knowledge informs environmental health research and environmental policy making in four distinct ways: 1) by making a cognitive contribution by rectifying the tendency towards reductionism; 2) by fostering of a “hybridizing” of professional discourse with local experience; 3) pointing out low-cost and more effective interventions or remedies; and 4) by raising previously unacknowledged distributive justice concerns that disadvantaged communities far too often face. We also draw from the work of German sociologist Ulrich Beck who postulates that as people become less constrained by social institutions, they are in a position to mold the process of modernization rather than remain passive observers of a system in which they hold no stake [3]. In Beck’s world, individuals have the opportunity to become change agents by way of information – information is key to the (re)shaping of the social and political world. For us the creation, sharing, and remixing of urban information is a primary component of Participatory Urbanism. Finally, in The Death and Life of Great American Cities Jane Jacobs writes that to understand cities we needed to “reason from the particulars to the general, rather than the reverse [and] to seek ‘unaverage’ clues involving very small quantities, which reveal the way larger and more ‘average’ quantities are operating” [4]. Jacobs continues, “Quantities of the ‘unaverage’, which are bound to be relatively small, are indispensable to vital cities”. Participatory Urbanism attempts to elevate the local expertise of citizens and their personal, small, unusual, local, particular experiences across urban life. The clear research initiative is to understand the roll that emerging in situ mobile technologies will play in this setting. We can fi nd mobile technology as a new mechanism for citizen driven urban participation. Using only text and picture messaging, citizens have already initiated signifi cant urban change. People Power 2: a four-day popular revolution that peacefully overthrew Philip-pine president Joseph Estrada in January 2001 where text messaging played a leading role Orange Revolution: a series of protests and political events coordinated using text messaging that took place in the Ukraine in 2004 that exposed massive corruption, voter intimidation, and direct electoral fraud between candidates Viktor Yushchenko and Viktor Yanukovych [5] TXTmob: a open source text messaging system used to coordinate protests during the United States Republican Presidential Convention in 2004 [6] Hollabacknyc.com: A blog where women “holla back” at harassers by taking their pictures with phonecams, then posting them online. Inspired by Thao Nguyen’s Flickr uploaded image of Dan Hoyt indecently exposing himself to her on a New York public subway in 2005 [7]. Parkscan.org: a system setup in 2003 allowing people voice concerns on park maintenance by uploading information about public park conditions as text and pictures from mobile devices and the web [8]. More recently, UCLA’s Center for Embedded Network Sensing has setup a research initiative called Participatory Sensing that is developing infrastructure and tools to enable individuals and groups to setup their own public “campaigns” for others to participate in by using networked mobile devices and sensors [9]. As strong advocates of such participatory models, our work expands upon the understanding of this research space by 1) focusing on an initial capstone application of air quality, 2) emphasizing the author-share-remix metaphor for “on-the-go” participation, and 3) expanding the integration of new sensors for mobile devices. We have also seen exciting new work that addresses sensor data sharing (Microsoft’s SenseWeb [10], Nokia’s SensorPlanet [11], and Platial [12]) and remixing (SensorMap [13], Mappr [14], Swivel [15], and Preemptive Media’s AIR (Areas Immediate Reading) mobile device [16]). 3 Mobile Phone Measurement Instrument Millions of us carry a mobile device such as a mobile phone with us everyday. For all of its »