Device study: Air Quality Egg and Smart Citizen Kit
4.3 Design: SCK as ambient citizenship
The SCK is physically a highly similar object to the AQE, but manages to string together an even broader range of rhetoric. Yet this also involves a fracturing between the physical properties of the hardware and the rhetoric of smart citizenship.
In June 2013, roughly a year after the AQE Kickstarter campaign, the Smart Citizen Kit (SCK) appeared on Kickstarter costing $155 plus shipping. The SCK Kickstarter was not
Figure 4.3: Screen capture from the SCK campaign video showing the sensor board arranged to sit on river pebbles to highlight its environmental credentials.
as successful as the AQE but still managed to reach its funding goal, raise $68,000 and gather 517 backers. The SCK firmware and hardware are based on the AQE and the device uses the same gas sensors but adds additional sensors as well as a smartphone app and online data platform. In order to gather backers, the SCK piggybacked on the publicity of the AQE by targeting people who already had an AQE or were interested in the de-vice. It appears that the SCK was promoted through a campaign of posting promotional comments on around a dozen AQE related websites:
“I would suggest to get a Smart Citizen kit instead. They have more sensors, it is self-powered using a solar panel (included in the kit) and it is going viral now worldwide. I expect the Smart Citizen kit will have much more users worldwide in the coming month” (Verrilli 2013).
The interesting aspect of the post is the way it emphasises that ‘more’ sensors and ‘more’
users are the main benefits of the SCK. The organised campaign of placing comments on AQE related website can be seen as a way of trying to highjack the existing AQE user community. The tone of the SCK Kickstarter campaign is also very similar to the AQE, suggesting that the SCK would be “empowering communities to collect data of what’s actually happening in their environment” (Acrobotic Industries 2013). Where the SCK dif-fers is that it is more evasive than the AQE about what the device actually senses. This can be seen in the campaign video that focuses on the attractive circuit board, arranged on a variety of natural backgrounds such as moistened pebbles by the side of a river
(Figure 4.3). This image is not a practical deployment since the circuit board is not wa-terproof and has no power-source; instead the aim of the image seems to be to create a symbolic association between the SCK and nature. This symbolic approach continues in the way the hardware is discussed on the SCK website, where the CO and NO2 sensors are referred to as ‘air composition sensors’ and the Wi-Fi chip that is used to upload the data, is referred to as a ‘network sensor’. In contrast, the campaign does not mention the accuracy or limitations of the gas sensors. When I interviewed the SCK organiser to clarify the measurement quality of the gas sensors, they argued that the SCK was better than the AQE because:
“Our device has extra features than the Air Quality Egg […] One of the things is having a sound sensor in the board. Also we are using the Wi-Fi antenna as a sensor as well, so we can know which is […] the amount of networks. We have a very good charger and our chip lasts around 30 hours”.
It is striking the way the respondent sidestepped the issue of measurement quality in favour of highlighting additional features and sensors. It is notable that the SCK campaign and websites do not feature the word ‘pollution’ and do not draw specific attention to the gas sensors. Yet this raises a fundamental question of what the SCK is actually sensing.
The SCK Kickstarter webpage describes the hardware as “the Ambient Board” (Acrobotic Industries 2013), suggesting that the SCK is sensing an non-specific and amorphous en-vironment. In the Amsterdam deployment, the SCK was described as sensing “the local climate in various neighbourhoods” (Blom & Zandbergen 2015). By building ambient sen-sors, the SCK enacts a form of environmental sensing that is not focused on pollution as an issue of health exposure or political contestation but as something rather different. In the interview with the organiser, the conversation quickly shifted from hardware sensors towards the ambitions of the project. When I asked how the SCK would relate to existing institutions, they replied:
“We will have the capability of having more resolution than the government, this means at least 10% of the citizens could put sensors on their balcony. We will have a bigger amount of sensors that will give us more resolution of the data and more points of comparison”.
The SCK thus makes an identical argument as the AQE, of having ‘more resolution’ - mean-ing more frequent data updates than governments. The organiser also argued that the project can import existing governmental data that the SCK does not have access to such
as traffic information. The argument the SCK presents is that it will become a platform for constructing autonomous cities and citizens that will transcend existing institutions.
The organiser argued that the SCK would extend human capabilities and support citizen science, urbanism, e-health, agriculture and facilitate neighbourhood 3D manufacturing.
Yet how does the SCK manage to string together this list of ideas and combine them into a single device? The website describes the SCK as a “node for building productive and open indicators, and distributed tools, and thereafter the collective construction of the city for its own inhabitants” (Smart Citizen 2016b). The quote implies that there is an inevitable progression from sensors to the collective construction of cities. When I asked how this would happen, the organiser mentioned 3D printing technologies. The idea being that the SCK would become a universal sensing and actuation hub, where the physical world can be digitally scanned (sensed), computationally transformed and then 3D printed out to create new cities. The SCK’s grand claims are thus based on piggyback-ing on another technology that has received vast amounts of publicity for its potential global impact. The reason the SCK suddenly seems to be much bigger than a mere elec-tronics board is because manages to string together entities that are themselves in hype.
Yet the ambitions of the SCK extend further as can be seen on the Kickstarter campaign that claimed the device will create new kinds of environmental citizenship:
“We are not asking you to eliminate your carbon footprint, nor attempting to turn you into a climate change crusader, nor claiming that the end of the world was triggered by you not recycling that can of soda last week… Experts of all kinds and points of view are working hard to tackle these problems, and talking heads add their two cents daily. Our goal is not to add to this chatter, but to help in the best way we know: Empowering communities to collect data of what’s actually happening in their environment” (Acrobotic Industries 2013, emphasis in original).
The quote rejects institutional framings of environmental behaviour such as recycling that are being promoted by ‘experts’. Instead the SCK proposes a new form of citizenship that is based on generating and observing data. The campaign video provides some detail of what is meant by this, by showing two users talking about the way they use the SCK, “I use my kit everyday, normally I take it in the morning just to have a global awareness of what is going on”. The second person says, “I check it everyday to see how the infor-mation is updated and how the data is uploaded for other people to see”. Surprisingly there is no mention of cognitively analysing the data for its content. Instead the SCK
proposes a kind of ambient data awareness that creates an affective feeling of data con-nectedness to a global sensing network. The SCK thus invokes the vision of the earth covered in an electronic skin of automated sensation (Gross 1999). In this way the SCK proposes a radically different notion of environmental citizenship from the classic con-cept of a democratic public sphere based on rational discourse (Habermas 1984). Instead the SCK offers a decentralised environmental citizenship that is based on an individual-istic awareness connected to collective data flows. If we see the SCK as an example of the autonomous networks narrative (subsection 2.3.3), then we can see it offering a dis-tinctly new smart citizenship that is different from governmental information campaigns or attempts to nudge people towards behaviour change (subsubsection 2.3.2.2).
Yet there is a striking gap between the grandeur of the SCK’s visions and its material prac-tices. While in some public presentations the SCK was described as a tool for organised environmental monitoring (Diez 2015), the website offers no guidance for how to apply the device for this purpose. During an event I attended in Amsterdam in April 2016, the scenarios being proposed by the SCK organisers were to observe the temperature change in the fridge as the door is opened and noticing the effect of next door’s air conditioning.
I suggest there is a wide gap between the vision of the SCK and the prosaic possibilities of the physical object. During the interview with the organiser, I was struck that when we were talking about the hardware, the conversation took place at a transcendental level, where the device seemed to be unconstrained by physical limitations. This can be seen in the way the SCK was renamed to ‘Smart Citizen’ by dropping any reference to the phys-ical hardware ‘kit’. The project also adopted the slogan - ‘upgrade yourself with others’
suggesting a science fiction vision where humans can improve themselves by inserting new sensors into their bodies. The feeling I had was that the SCK was trying to shed the material world in favour of sensing as a techno-spiritual practice of transhuman citizen-ship.
Yet the result is that the SCK is very similar to the AQE in the way it enacts environmental sensing as solipsistic data generation and curation. The fracturing between the rhetorical ambitions and the limitations of the hardware mean that there is no external environment being sensed. Instead the environment is enacted as a symbolic and immaterial aesthetic that seems to offer little transformative potential. The next section explores the usage practices of this device.