Neighbourhood SatellitesEnvironment Sensing Adventures in the City
To make the detection of local environmental conditions an engaging activity, this project integrates mobile game play with grassroots air sensing.
In the fast growing cities of this world, where networks are found and lost on the fly, we roam through our daily environments carrying mobile technologies along that help us escape on the move, and fade into experiences that are often detached from our immediate surroundings. Since we are often not aware of the air we breathe, the penetrating noise that affects us, or the cosmos of living things all around — what if our mobile technology could allow us to reconnect to our surroundings, to sense and read environmental data straight from the source, data that had been obscured to us before?
The information about our environmental conditions is usually collected by expert scientists, evaluated by politicians and mediated through different kinds of channels. Often this creates a divide between actually experiencing these conditions and understanding their meaning.
Neighbourhood Satellites enables people to read their environmental conditions as they move, and tries to make this activity an engaging and playful experience.
With many people monitoring and knowing about their neighbourhoods collectively and sharing their findings, they might possibly come to take actions in their communities.
My Masters thesis project at Interaction Design Institute Ivrea, completed in June 2005.
At:
Exit, Torino
PerGames2005, Munich
Stadio San Siro, Milan
Year:
2005
