What if instead of creating a new community from a scratch, we seek and approach existing communities in Barcelona?
The strategy is to research which existing communities in Barcelona could be identified as a potential users of the Smart Citizen sensing devices as well as contributors to the open data platform.
There are several interesting group to investigate:
urban gardeners, members of science clubs, engineering students, civic centers members, environmentalists, etc… Read More
The Smart Re-Use Network comes from the idea of bringing people together into a smart community. The current Smart Citizen Platform accepts the input of Data from sensored devices to measure environmental information like contamination, sound, light, temperature, etc. This project aims to the people, understanding them as the sensors and also taking into account that we carry sensors always with us, like the computers, smartphones and tablets. Recycling and managing waste in the city becomes interactive in a way that the user is directly involved in a ‘gamelike’ environment always having information accessible about location and condition of things in the city. A whole new environment of ‘exchange shopping’ can be achievable by joining community efforts and precedents that are already working and available in the city of Barcelona.
The proposal implies using the Smart Citizen Platform to visualize and account ‘things’ in the city. A platform that provides the instruments to reuse and exchange items in an interactive manner. Multi-device applications can be accessed at any time to view the realtime data while specific actions can be done to acquire a desired item. The Users can use the open information about things to track and reserve items, and then look for them. The user has the advantage of having the ability to filter items on a map or on a list by class or location.
More info will be posted soon.
Our proposal for the Smart Net Studio is a mobile application dedicated for walkers in the city.
Principal elements of the concept:
THE VISIBLE CITIES
This project consists in a system to use cameras to collect data and comprehend the metabolic dynamics on people’s movement and enhance geo-position tools. It aims to be implemented on Smart Citizen platform as an urban tool to identify the where amount of people, but also, to be as useful as an installation for those who experience the city.
Adding more options and functionalities to SmartCitizen will ensure its being used by a larger number of citizens. In addition to censored data, I am interested in enabling a layer of physical objects to the platform. I am proposing the use of RFID technology. Below are some examples of projects where we can use tagged objects and reader units, that detect the presence of the tagged object and map it on the platform.
1. A citizen based bike/moto parking:
How does that work?
1. Fablab fabricates bike station units that has embedded RFID reader.
2. A campaign is made to encourage bikers to come to fablab and make their own tags.
3. Stations will appear on the system with its location and maximum capacity of bikes.
4. When a tagged bike is there, it appears on the system, so bikers can tell how many slots are left and whether they can park or not.
We can start by a couple of stations in dense areas. If the people liked it, they will use it and request more (and fund it!).
I don’t know how bicing works, but if it doesn’t have something similar, then it needs one.
Of course, I am not talking about creating new stations, just simply applying the system to existing parkings:
2. Recycling stations:
Similar to the above, SmatCitizen can contribute to encouraging re-use and recycling, by creating SmartCitizen recycling stations. Stations could be placed in second hand markets (Glorias, Sants, where else?). Through a simple campaign, we encourage citizens to make their own tags and link it to the objects they want to place in the station. If a tagged object is near, then it is “checked in”. We can make different categories of objects (electronics, fabric, books, etc) and assign cards of different frequencies to each one, so they are mapped with different colors on the map, or we can simply make different stations for each kind of objects. Tags will be reused, of course.
//More to follow.
