Date post: | 12-Sep-2014 |
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Design |
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Introducing living dhaka, a social technology experiment to measure activity in the city
tiger tags
Living Dhaka
a tiger tag is just a piece of paper with a qr code embedded with a unique but anonymous id e.g. bengaltiger445
when an individual carries it, he or she becomes a tiger who can then be tracked by smartphone carrying volunteers.
one scan can log a host of information on those tigers
4:59 pm (time)
23.70, 90.44 (location)
walking (transport mode)
smiling(happiness)
which can then be sent into the cloud and aggregrated to produce measurements like the following which we tested at mit
where the tigers roamed
Living Showcase at MIT | Nov 17, 2011
when the tigers came and went, how long they stayed
what the tigers were interested in the relationship btwn what they liked and where it was
located
6 smartphones, 8 volunteers, 140 tigers total cost - $200 (t-shirts, printing zebra tags, phones borrowed)
development time – 4 (long) days, 1-2 people
Living Showcase at MIT | Nov 17, 2011
50 smartphones, 100 volunteers, x tigers? total cost - $10-20,000
we’d like to measure things not normally measured (e.g. pedestrian flows, bus ridership,
cycle rickshaw flows) and understand how both the measurements themselves and the social process of measurement is received by the city
development time – 2 months
Living Dhaka | week of January12, 2012
Old Dhaka Pedestrian Density & Flows
10 AM 1 PM 6 PM
experimental design 50 scanners at 25 fixed nodes 3 separate scanning times color of dots = high no. of scans/minute
(LARGER SCALE)
Living Dhaka | week of January12, 2012
main pedestrian corridors
(MEDIUM SCALE)
6 PM
Firmgate Bus Ridership and Speeds
experimental design 50 scanners @ 6 fixed nodes size of colors represents number of people alighting from those stops from farmgate speed calculated by average of consecutive scans
<5 km/h
5-10 km/h
10-15 km/h
Living Dhaka | week of January12, 2012
tap-ins
estimated speeds
tap-outs
(MEDIUM SCALE)
8 PM
Dhanmondi Lake Happiness and Density Map
experimental design 50 roaming scanners 1 scanning time at peak time blue color = places of highest number of happy people
Living Dhaka | week of January12, 2012
favorite spots
did this experiment work? would data change your mind?
Before After
we’d like to measure before and after an experiment that improves car-free travel*
Living Dhaka | week of January12, 2012
* are there any experiments that improve car-free travel in dhaka that can be measured in mid-january?
Living Dhaka | week of January12, 2012
Albert Ching is an aspiring urban innovator, a lifelong Hawaiian and former Googler based in Mountain View, Hyderabad and Singapore. Albert is enduring the frigid cold of Boston to help cities innovate, specifically by using the proliferation of information technologies to solve transport problems in South and Southeast Asia. He is a researcher for the Singapore-MIT Alliance’s Future of Urban Mobility project. www.mrching.blogspot.com
Muntasir Mamun Imran is a nature lover, adventure-trekker, and an experienced social entrepreneur from Bangladesh. He is the co-founder of Kewkradong Bangladesh, country coordinator for the Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup, and Organizer of the Banff Mountain Film Festival World Tour. He has organized cycling rides throughout Bangladesh including the Sir Edmund Hillary Ride, the Ride for Green, and the LiveStrong Ride. www.muntasirmamun.com/
Collaborators
Stephen Kennedy is a designer and artist formerly based in Atlanta with a background in Industrial Design from Georgia Tech. At first a reluctant transplant to Boston, Stephen has enjoyed trying to escape frigid New England by working as a hybrid planner-designer on signage initiatives in New Orleans, greenway planning in the Bronx, urban realm technology in Thessaloniki, and participatory planning in Indonesia. His focus is on both physical planning and spatial information design. www.stephenjameskennedy.com
P. Chris Zegras is the Ford Assistant Professor of Urban Planning and Transportation at MIT. His research interests include the influence of the built environment on individual travel behavior, transportation infrastructure and system financing, indicators of sustainable transportation, and mitigating transportation greenhouse gas emissions. On these and other related topics, he has consulted widely, including for the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Canadian, German, US, and Peruvian Governments, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, and the United Nations Center for Regional Development.
Zia Wadud is an Associate Professor in Civil Engineering at the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET). Zia completed his PhD from Imperial College London in Civil Engineering Policy in 2008 as a Commonwealth Scholar and held research positions at the University of Cambridge and at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Zia’s current research interests are in modeling and valuation of policy interventions in the transportation and environment sector (including climate change policy), modeling energy demand and assessing risk and vulnerability in the context of broader Civil Engineering topics.
Advisors
inspired by the bengal tiger and stripe spotter
appendix
mobile phones smartphones
cars
Dhaka today
auto lock-in line (10-20%)
window of opportunity
48%
1%
<1%
Jakarta
Bangkok
Sydney Chicago
time
pene
trat
ion
why dhaka? small window of opportunity to avoid car-centric development but need creative solutions that employ a limited number of smartphones
We have big ambitions . . .
zebra tags
Can the mayor of Dhaka run his city like an MIT scientist managing a lab of experiments?
Data à Decisions
People à Data à Visualizations à rebranding car alternatives + the city à Decisions
Experiments -> measurement (through people and phones) à Iteration à Remeasurement à new experiments à repeat à rinse -> repeat faster
Feelings à Decisions we are here
where we’d like cities to be
2 MEASUREMENT
3 IMPACT
4 SUSTAINABLE
1 SOCIAL TECHNOLOGY
Social will people in dhaka want to be measured? in what format? how should volunteers be organized and motivated? technology will the technology work as planned in dhaka? how fast can the system be rapidly iterated on and deployed?
measure pre- and post- experiments how to tell if there is a difference? measure things otherwise difficult to measure how often the rich and poor meet make visible the invisible pedestrians, cycle rickshaws, the poor, the aged
data -> decisions people à data à visualizations à rebranding car alternatives + the city à decisions experiments -> measurement (through people and phones) à Iteration à Remeasurement à new experiments à repeat à rinse -> repeat faster
start
finish
zebra tags as a store of commercial value integration with mobile payments incentives to motivate users to scan value to local businesses and transport providers
but there’s a lot we don’t know
1 PRINT QR BADGES
3 SCAN CITIZENS IN
TARGET AREA
4 REGISTER CITIZENS AT
NOTABLE POINTS
2 DISTRIBUTE TO CITIZENS
OUTSIDE TARGET AREA
Measurement Process
Living Dhaka | week of January12, 2012
3 FIXED vs. FLEXIBLE
SCANNERS
4 SIZE OF MEASUREMENT
AREA
Measurement Variables
1 NO. OF SCANNERS
2 SCANNING TIME
target is 50 10 teams of 5
target is <1 second
peak capacity = 50 x 60 = 300 data points per minute, or 18,000 per hour
fixed
flexible
single street or few blocks
large neighborhood or street network
Living Dhaka | week of January12, 2012
The Urban Launchpad is a MIT-started social mission-driven company / research lab aspiring to accelerate experimentation and innovation in cities
through rapid prototyping and performance measurement on an urban scale