A Vehicle for Research: Using Street Sweepers to Explore the Landscape of Environmental Community Action

TL;DR

This paper explores how mobile sensing platforms, specifically street sweepers equipped with air quality sensors, can serve as tools for environmental community action and research, providing insights into effective technological interventions.

Contribution

It introduces a novel deployment of street sweepers as research vehicles for environmental sensing and offers qualitative insights into fostering community action through technology.

Findings

Street sweepers can effectively collect environmental data in urban areas.

Community engagement is crucial for translating data into action.

Qualitative analysis reveals key factors for meaningful technological interventions.

Abstract

Researchers are developing mobile sensing platforms to facilitate public awareness of environmental conditions. However, turning such awareness into practical community action and political change requires more than just collecting and presenting data. To inform research on mobile environmental sensing, we conducted design fieldwork with government, private, and public interest stakeholders. In parallel, we built an environmental air quality sensing system and deployed it on street sweeping vehicles in a major U.S. city; this served as a "research vehicle" by grounding our interviews and affording us status as environmental action researchers. In this paper, we present a qualitative analysis of the landscape of environmental action, focusing on insights that will help researchers frame meaningful technological interventions.