Understanding mass participatory pervasive computing systems for environmental campaigns

Abstract

Participate was a 3-year collaboration between industry and academia to explore how mobile, Web and broadcast technologies could combine to deliver environmental campaigns. In a series of pilot projects, schools used mobile sensors to enhance science learning; visitors to an ecological attraction employed mobile phones to access and generate locative media; and the public played a mobile phone game that challenged their environmental behaviours. Key elements of these were carried forward into an integrated trial in which participants were assigned a series of environmental missions as part of an overarching narrative that was delivered across mobile, broadcast and Web platforms. These experiences use a three-layered structure for campaigns that draw on experts, local groups and the general public, who engage through a combination of playful characterisation and social networking.

NeuroPlace: Categorizing urban places according to mental states

“…This work support previous effort in utilising wearable sensors for emption analysis in the wild [ 51 – 59 ], in particular, the analysis of EEG data in urban outdoor places opens a window for new applications including:…”

Moths at midnight

“…The project is focused upon understanding the role that mobile and ubiquitous technologies could play in supporting people that are engaged in such citizen science-based activities. In order to understand the setting we carried out a rapid ethnographic study f [11], focusing on participant observations and recording the associated ephemera relating to the activities that were engaged in by the people that we observed, as such studies have been carried out previously in order to demonstrate the implications for the design of mobile and ubiquitous multimedia systems [2] [7]. In order to document the research we took video, photographs and handwritten notes.…”

“…OpenScientist.org, an organisation dedicated to citizen science, write: "A citizen scientist is a volunteer who collects and/or processes data as part of a scientific enquiry." For a fuller understanding of citizen science and mobile sensor-based ubicomp systems see Chamberlain et al [2]. Yet within this area there is an apparent paucity of studies that relate to the way that such technological interventions may support the existing activities of the communities of practice and communities of engagement, who are already carrying out scientific studies and reporting results.…”

Listening to the forest and its curators

“…Participatory sensing approaches enable people equipped with sensors or their own mobile devices to collect information from their environment as part of their everyday activities and interpret it within context [5,6]. Environmental impact has been a particular focus for participatory sensing with the general public tracking and measuring climate change and pollution [2,8,19].…”

“…It has also shown the importance of the in-situ experience and how it can contribute to the interpretation of the collected data [6,12,20]. Education has also played an important role, with environment-visiting based work such as Ambient Wood [21], Ubigreen [11] and e-Science in schools [23] using mobile devices/sensors to educate participants about the environment.…”