Sensing Practices
Sensing practices is the way in which we use technological sensors to observe, monitor, engage and asses our environment. These practices do not necessarily have to be performed by specialists in their field but can actually be executed by normal citizens like you and me, who have a cause or passion in what they do. This citizen’s passion could be driven by political, environmental, or simply by recreational reasons. With the constant availability of computation, connection and the ubiquitousness of technology, inhabitants in different environments and various locations can be part of observation and collecting data-sets.
The Citizen sense project by Professor Jennifer Gabrysis does exactly that, it is a project that started in 2013 that probes and explores the links between technologies and experiments that citizens engage with using varied types of sensors, from smart phone devices to tiny microchips. These engagements between technological senses and people, make it possible to “listen in on the planet” ( Gabrys 20) and try to understand the changes it is facing by applying sensing on pollution sites, urban environments, and wild Fiona and flora activities . The projects traverses between many locations around the world. One location was north-eastern Pennsylvania, in the US, over a period of 7 monthsthe Frackbox device was used to collect data by citizens around fracking infrastructures nearby. Another example of a project that was organized by Citizen sense was an urban sensing investigation in the south London area of Deptford. Employing the Dustbox kit that uses the shinyei sensor, citizens started to gather pollution data and that was included part of the resulting research.
The posting of the citizen and the way they engage in sensing practices brings to mind a documentary about a project that deploys citizens specifically females, in poor-stricken locations to install solar-panels; sophisticated sensors that absorb the sun’s rays as a source of energy for generating electricity or heating for impoverished communities. The barefoot college in India, which is responsable for such a project, is a voluntary organisation working in many fields which women empowerment is one, they choose female citizens to be part of the electrification project through solar power for the upliftment of rural people. Instead of having specialised technicians deployed to those areas, the selected female citizen receives a 6-month training program learning about solar panels and storage batteries before returning home where they maintain and repair the systems. This particular scene could be thought of as a “milieu” where which technology, sensors, and citizens interact together to have a thriving community that lives of this new improved environment.
Resources:
Jennifer. Gabrys. Program Earth: Environmental Sensing Technology and the Making of a Computational Planet. Electronic Mediations ; 49. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016.
THE WHY. Solar Mamas — Why Poverty?Accessed February 21, 2019. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ON_NQ1HnRYs.
