Stories on Air
ENLISTING SATELLITE TECHNOLOGY TO BATTLE FOR ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE
2016, NY
Partners: NASA Langley Research Center, We Act (Environmental justice org), Parsons NY DESIS Lab
Winner at Prized Solutions: Reimagining NYC, The New School Center for New York City Affairs.
Published at Urban Matter publication.
TEAM: Lauren Atkins & Haijing Zhang
How might we leverage new technologies and data collection with storytelling content to make data more human-touched and create new counter-narratives?
'Stories on Air' is a story collection toolkit linking NASA's air pollution data to community members' stories using data visualization and geotagging. It reinforces story collection methods for community-based organizations by empowering citizens to use their voice and make a difference in the political process. Our mission was to bridge big data between citizens and policymakers through storytelling that humanizes big data and given it a face.
Challenge & Design Opportunity
Air pollution is a problem. We can measure its increasing numbers in our communities and see its negative effects on health and the environment. Most of us want something to change.
How do you measure and evaluate the impacts air pollution has on a community to make policy changes? New technology from TEMPO will allow us to record unprecedented scientific data.
What happens, though, once we have collected these numbers? Data alone cannot change policy. We recognized the tendency to be seduced by big data to establish validity when making an impact. In practice, science can be questioned, and data can feel removed from our daily experiences.
Community-based organizations touch on the human element in the political process: they collect community members' stories around issues they want to impact and drive policy change.
We believe in linking communities' stories and data to build empathy and make data feel more 'human,' to ultimately influence policymakers. We also think visualizing data can elicit these stories.
We called this 'datatelling.' Technology to capture data has been continuous, being improved upon, 'datatelling' keeps stories on par with constantly evolving data.
Outcomes & Benefits
Stories on Air works to enhance the current system of WE ACT organization by addressing this on multiple levels:
'Datatelling' Merging Storytelling and Data to Give a Face to Numbers:
Humanizing the data will enhance policy change because it provides the foundation for combining the quantitative data with the qualitative as an effective change-making tool.
The more accurate and updating scientific data from NASA can make the testimonials more convincing when presented to policymakers.
Visibility & Awareness/Making Data Visible
• By providing a platform for local communities to share their individual experiences of air pollution's effects on their personal lives, this project empowers people to make a difference.
• They are engaged in community-building and empowered by listening to other community members' stories and recording their own. And have the opportunity to receive a sense of shared experiences and belonging.
• Many individuals don't always have an awareness of air quality in their daily lives. This web platform can gain access to knowledge and understanding of scientific air pollution data locally. Improving and Creating a System for an Existing Strategy:
• Building off the story-collection efforts of WE ACT, this project builds community awareness and engagement with the portable and dynamic story collecting toolkit.
The toolkit provides the organization an opportunity to reach and expose its agenda to a broader range of populations, extend its reach, and enrich the efficiency of getting stories without home visits.
• By providing the geotagging service, we give the stories an external validation and strengthen human experience with science in front of policymakers.
Methods & Strategy
We started the process by diagramming, identifying stakeholders, and the opportunities to bridge two areas together. After choosing the stakeholders, WeAct and Nasa, we wanted to work with design-led research methods and a service design blueprint to identify key intervention areas. Using a Transdisciplinary design approach bridged two separate disciplines: technology & data with the human component. After that, we began the prototyping phase; we did this in Harlem's community to make it collaborative and participatory
to gather community members' insights in informing our design proposal.
Field & Secondary Research, and Expert Interviews:To gain a deeper understanding of community members' perception of air quality and its roles in their daily lives. Hunch: Basing on our research, we suspected that leveraging NASA's scientific big data with a community-based environmental justice organization's (WeAct) storytelling content; will make data more human-touched.
System Mapping: Strategy map and a user-journey blueprint to get a more in-depth understanding into WeAct, as a community-based organization, to guide us in the best direction to determine our intervention space.
The highlighted areas are the spaces our toolkit and its elements intervene in.
Synthesis and Insights Gathering: One of the key insights we gathered was that WeAct's collection of community members' testimonials is a vital element in their effort to affect policymakers; however, they
lack a method of sustaining the story collection efficiently. Our strategy was to strengthen their storytelling component, increase their reach to a broader audience, and give the stories more profound meaning. Design and Implementation: designing a systemic intervention to reinforce WeAct's current story collection method and linking this to NASA data; to enhance the stories' validity, ultimately leaving a more significant impact on policymakers.
Supporting Technology: We wanted our system to collect or archive the stories interactively and addressed this with the online geotagging platform. Prototype & Iteration: Based on this concept, we conceived a toolkit as a catalyst to reinforce WeAct's story collection and a website to sustain these stories. To test our idea in the real world with users, we quickly made a physical prototype to test in the West Harlem community to interview people on the street.
