What human-centered market opportunities exist for low to medium cost air quality sensors in cities Oslo, Munich and San José?
The challenge
For our 3 month summer MSc Design Ethnography thesis project we (a team of 3) were tasked by a large tech company to conduct ethnographic research around air quality in three cities, and use our insights to create a prototype proposal.
Project story
What are the relevant air quality issues?
We looked at understand past, current and future issues related to air quality and relevant technologies: air sensor technology, the Internet of Things, Smart Cities, Big Data. We were inspired by Peripheria's Human Smart City Cookbook and took a deliberately human centered approach to our research.
Who should we talk to, to find out more?
Starting with a common stakeholder map derived from the UN’s Urban Air Quality Management Toolbook, we identified local area stakeholders along a spectrum from government to single citizen. A few rounds of co-creating produced a selection of protocols for different types of people.
Talking to people / gathering data:
Each location required a slightly different approach. My strategy was to start with a field trip to San José to get a flavor of the city and ask people to answer a short questionnaire. Expert interviews with public and governmental figures followed, then one-to-one interviews with business owners, activists and individual citizens. A range of participants were eventually recruited, giving a comprehensive overview of air quality issues and perspectives.
Learning from each other:
To collaborate remotely, we shared data via GoogleDocs and Mural.ly and created sense making protocols to help us affinitize our data. We found that officials and activists are concerned with vehicle traffic as the main air quality problem in our three cities, but convenience culture and lack of awareness inhibit public buy-in.
What is the specific problem in my city?
Stakeholder maps, and air quality issue maps helped us to see relationships and the nature of these connections for each city. From here we could pull out common and unique air quality themes and barriers to behavior change that may have implications for sensor use. Those themes and barriers are used to define a design challenge: (How can low cost air sensing be used to engage citizens towards reaching progressive City goals?)
Addressing the design challenge:
A prototype proposal was developed for each city, addressing the unique issues concerning citizen engagement around air quality.
Recruitment flyer with project branding.
Our air quality stakeholder map, derived from the UN's Urban Air Quality Management Toolbook.
People on the street rated the air in San José from 1 to 10, with 10 the best.
Everyone agrees traffic is the problem
A noticable number of San José cyclists prefer to use the sidewalk as they don't feel safe on the road.
Issue maps help to make sense of the data.
Skills & learnings
Key learnings
- Daily check ins and protocols for everything helped to limit confusion.
- More time could be allocated to analysis as this took longer to do remotely.
- Our kindness based work experiment helped us get along and provided protocol when issues arose.
My contribution
We were a tight-knit and highly collaborative team, meeting daily to review our timeline and assign tasks. Alongside our research, I had a hand in planning and management and being the only native English speaker took the role of client point person / external communications and editor for reports and presentations.
