Citizen science on bikes in museums and schools: being part of mobility change research with the senseBox:bike

Abstract

Bikes and bike friendly cities are becoming the core theme of mobility change. In the presented projects we apply and investigate data-driven and participatory approaches to enable changes in bike-friedly policy and city infrastructure. Together with Futurium - house of futures - and several fablabs we co-designed a participatory approach to empower citizens to be part of the mobility change in Berlin. 30 citizens participated in the senseBox:bike workshop, built mobile senseBoxes to measure environmental phenomena, distance of surpassing cars and road or bike-lane quality. Some of the citizens collected mobile data for over 2 years, which was published as open data on openSenseMap and visualized in an interactive “living exhibit” in the Futurium Lab. We organized an intermediate lab meeting with some of the participants to discuss feed-back, usability and the software of the protoypical device and re-co-designed the senseBox:bike to an open source product for mobile bike data collection. After two years we are meeting the citizen scientists again at Futurium and interview them about motivations, obstacles, experiences in the project. We adapted the approach with an more educational focus and designed workshops for five schools in Essen, evolving the participatory approach: the students work in the local quarters of the city, they build, program and mount the devices to their bikes, they conduct data collection and analysis, and then get into dialogue with local politicians, following the spatial citizenship approach.

Keywords

• citizen science
• mobility change
• sensors
• environ