Explorative Sensing
One of my favorite feelings when visiting a new place, city or country, is being in that liminal space that leads into curiosity, nervousness and a deep desire to take in as much as you can from your unusual surroundings. It almost seems that our bodies have the capability to focus on details that we seem to not mind within our common circumambient. This allows us to see things from a lens that takes in relevant minutiae that would otherwise go unnoticed. This might have been a survival mechanism brought to us by evolution but it still seems highly relevant within our contemporary lives.
From new food sources to new planets, humans have always had an internal spark for exploration. Our nomadic origins paved the way for hundreds of civilizations to explore new grass lands, countries, continents and even other celestial bodies. Our explorative desires, equipped with increased attention to detail, have resulted in some of the most significant collective transformations.
Cities are the cornerstone for today’s civilizations and they nurture our curiosity in ways that, I believe, could be more significant than what we imagine. It is here where I see that we can gain great insight into how we sense cities by looking at our explorative and detail-focused instincts. Exploration is crucial to the vibrancy of cities. When in cities, exploration tends to be guided by a more stochastic behavior; decisions of where we walk to, what we choose to look at, where we exercise, play or rest, might not always be completely rational. However, when seen from the outside, they do show the emergence of unique semi-structured patterns that could help us understand how communities are functioning.
Current sensing infrastructure is deployed in highly structured and top down manners. Sensors are accurately placed on optimal locations that allow the smart infrastructure owners to extract images of the city that can only tell the story from the perspective of the people deploying the devices. Let’s contrast this approach and ponder the following questions: What would sensing infrastructure look like if it had humans’ unique explorative traits? Would unstructured sensing systems be able to narrate stories and images from uncommon perspectives? Would exploration and random sensing give us access to previously unseen information?
Explorative sensing could take the form of crowdsourced data collection done by citizens or city dwellers, sensor dust, mobile sensors with navigation models that introduce randomness and emulate curiosity, or even biological entities, like insects or smaller carbon-based particles, that navigate our modern urban environments. I believe this approach could give our systems a layer that would allow them to see and feel cities as humans have been doing for millennia.
… what will we find? I can’t wait to see!
© Andres Rico
© Andres Rico
© Andres Rico