BOSTON - SMART CITY - Urban Lab
June 2016 ||| SCOPE: Sensors, Smart City, Living Lab ||| PROJECT: Local Sense Lab
An urban laboratory in the heart of downtown Boston, stocked with sensors, staffed by Boston's best technologists, and completely open to the public.
Described by Stephen Walter - The City of Boston and the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics
As connected sensor technologies grow in popularity, there is increasing fragmentation of the field, technological tunnel vision, lack of public engagement, and lack of clarity to city planning offices, community advocacy groups, and citizens around the value of sensors.
What’s more is that the unique potential of agile sensor technologies to be connected and correlated to produce novel and rich new insights around the fabric of city spaces has not been properly demonstrated. Most experiments with sensor data have taken place in silos, where one technology was evaluated by itself, or in proprietary settings where data and methods are not shared publicly. Other experiments, such as Array of Things in Chicago, test a variety of sensors working together, but in a single spot and in a very controlled and limited design. We want to know how sensors designed by multiple researchers/companies that are dispersed throughout an urban environment can better inform urban planning.
Toward confronting these challenges, we aim to take advantage of the vibrant ecosystem of sensor researchers, data analysts, and community groups in the Boston area to help guide how we as a city evaluate, deploy, and analyze the data from networked sensors for designing better urban infrastructure, behavior, and engagement.
The City of Boston and the Mayor’s Office of New Urban Mechanics aim to jumpstart this initiative by conducting a series of initial experiments, facilitating conversations, partnering on grants, and providing guidance from planning departments. Ultimately, the City would like to step back and be just one partner representing the public sector in a self-sustaining co-op that includes researchers, companies, and community groups.
Leading the technical side and facilitating the hyperlocal testbed will be the Local Sense Lab and leading the engagement piece will be the Boston Civic Media Consortium and Engagement Lab.