A vehicle for research: using street sweepers to explore the landscape of environmental community action

  • Authors:

  • Paul M. Aoki;R. J. Honicky;Alan Mainwaring;Chris Myers;Eric Paulos;Sushmita Subramanian;Allison Woodruff

  • Affiliations:

  • Intel Research, Berkeley, CA, USA;University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA;Intel Research, Berkeley, CA, USA;Isopod Design, San Francisco, CA, USA;Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA;Intel Corporation, Santa Clara, CA, USA;Intel Research, Berkeley, CA, USA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Researchers are developing mobile sensing platforms to facilitate public awareness of environmental conditions. However, turning such awareness into practical community action and political change requires more than just collecting and presenting data. To inform research on mobile environmental sensing, we conducted design fieldwork with government, private, and public interest stakeholders. In parallel, we built an environmental air quality sensing system and deployed it on street sweeping vehicles in a major U.S. city; this served as a research vehicle"by grounding our interviews and affording us status as environmental action researchers. In this paper, we present a qualitative analysis of the landscape of environmental action, focusing on insights that will help researchers frame meaningful technological interventions.