Sensing in the Public Domain
Sensing has become an important and rapidly demanded method of understanding our built environment. Be it from understanding the energy performance at a building scale to using footpaths on the street. These demands come from increasing efficiency, optimizing performance, and creating a path forward backed by empirical evidence. This brings to question the policies, methods, and goals of sensing in today’s urban environment.
A lot of what we call “tech” today lies within device-level applications. However, urban tech operates in a grey and currently undefined area. The device layer is the city, and the applications are the deployments of sensors within the device. However, no individual user within the device can make decisions on data governance; it lies either with the city or with the urban tech company’s altruism. We must then demand and understand how we think of privacy policies in the public domain. Is it a generic privacy agreement each citizen signs, or perhaps at the sensor level with every possible attempt to preserve privacy made?
Our team chose to test what it would require to develop and design a sensor with privacy in mind. Setting out to solve this problem, we took an interest in understanding what activities and flows in our public space are like. This process required understanding how much data is needed, our end-use cases, and potential sensors.
Through an iterative process, we realized that privacy through software alone was not entirely perfect, and it required a hardware level of intervention. We aimed to implement a thermal sensor built with an edge compute node that can quickly process and out binary data without ever requiring raw data storage. Using existing computer vision algorithms to create human tracks, we set out to understand and enumerate our public spaces within Avery Hall. Through experimentation and analysis, we tested and learnt of the costs and benefits of using such hardware in our public domain.
Sensor Build Out
Read and learn more on the project website!