Community-Empowered Air Quality Monitoring System
Abstract
Developing information technology to democratize scientific knowledge and support citizen empowerment is a challenging task. In our case, a local community suffered from air pollution caused by industrial activity. The residents lacked the technological fluency to gather and curate diverse scientific data to advocate for regulatory change. We collaborated with the community in developing an air quality monitoring system which integrated heterogeneous data over a large spatial and temporal scale. The system afforded strong scientific evidence by using animated smoke images, air quality data, crowdsourced smell reports, and wind data. In our evaluation, we report patterns of sharing smoke images among stakeholders. Our survey study shows that the scientific knowledge provided by the system encourages agonistic discussions with regulators, empowers the community to support policy making, and rebalances the power relationship between stakeholders.
Associated Lab - CREATE: Community Robotics, Associated Lab - Education and Technology Empowerment
BibTeX
@conference{Hsu-2017-103509,author = {Yen-Chia Hsu and Paul Dille and Jennifer Cross and Beatrice Dias and Randy Sargent and Illah Nourbakhsh},
title = {Community-Empowered Air Quality Monitoring System},
booktitle = {Proceedings of CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '17)},
year = {2017},
month = {May},
pages = {1607 - 1619},
publisher = {ACM},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
keywords = {dversarial design, air quality, citizen science, community engagement, data visualization, participatory design, sustainable hci},
}