Output: AQE & SCK as network monuments and good practice exemplarsand good practice exemplars

I now turn to examine the outputs of the devices as global hardware dispersal and as good practice exemplars.

Both the AQE and SCK Kickstarter campaigns promised to deliver sensor hardware to backers. So when the hardware was shipped there were no other explicit goals. 6 months after the sensor boards were shipped, it is possible to see a decline in active discussions

on both the AQE mailing list and SCK forum. At the time of writing in 2017, the original AQE devices are no longer supported and the company that used to host the AQE’s data has been sold as a commercial entity and backers can no longer access the historical data from their own AQE device. The SCK is also in a state of decline with the public forum filled with unanswered technical queries and people asking whether the project is dead.

Nevertheless, the devices are continuing both as hardware iterations and as conceptual assemblages. There is now version 2 AQE hardware available from a third party supplier with what is described as ‘factory sensor calibration’. The SCK hardware is also being developed further as part of a major EU H2020 funded research consortium called ‘Making Sense’. Interestingly the project’s tag line “from making sensors to sensemaking” (Making-sense 2016) creates a direct to link to the (Making-sensemaking rhetoric of the AQE.

I now focus on the remaining legacy of the original Kickstarted versions of the AQE and SCK. I will examine the data visualisations of the AQE and SCK and citations of the projects, to analyse how they function as an ongoing legacy. When visiting the AQE and SCK websites, one is immediately presented with a world map covered in thousands of devices, (Figure 4.4). The feeling one gets is of impressive global coverage with dense clusters around population hubs. However, if one clicks on the icons, it becomes clear that the data is old, and most of the devices have been inoperable for years. The main visualisations of the AQE and SCK do not show live data but a historical aggregation of all the devices that have ever been online. On the SCK website it is possible to filter and see that only 19 out of 762 devices are active (as of April 2016). The AQE website does not provide a means of filtering out the dead devices and when I spent an hour clicking around I could not find an active device. The map page does not display the generated data but highlights the geographical locations of the hardware. To see the data requires clicking on an individual device to see the raw sensor values. While the SCK provides a more sophisticated interface, the contextual information on the sensor data is basic. The visualisation mode focuses on the solitary sensor device and does not provide a way to compare data between devices. The analogy is that each sensing device is an autonomous submarine on its own. What is absent is a visualisation that splices the data together into a single surface to provide a sense of a contiguous environment. Unless one is exactly next to the sensor device one cannot begin to see what ones exposure level might be.

Clicking through the data is an emotionally flat experience of abstract numbers without comparison or interpretation.

Figure 4.4: Top: Screenshot of the AQE map showing all the devices that have ever been registered.

Bottom: Screenshot of the SCK map showing all the devices that have ever been registered with the numbers representing the quantity of devices at that location.

The impression I have looking at the AQE and SCK visualisation is that the sensor data is treated as secondary compared to the geographical distribution of the devices. What matters is the image of the globe covered in hardware to demonstration that the projects succeed in creating a global network. The sense is that this visualisation is intended to convey the vision of a global IOT. This symbolic quality is emphasised in a Fast Company article, which describes that “egg icons blanket the online map in expected regions like Western Europe and the northeastern U.S., but also in the country of Georgia, between the Black and Caspian Seas, where a community group purchased 38 of them” (Captain 2016, para.6). The article goes one to argue that these sensor networks are a “perfect example of how Internet of Things will work in the future” (para.8). In this way the visualisations function as a mythical monument to the possibility of creating a global IOT. These quali-ties of the visualisation reaffirm the AQE and SCK as solipsistic hardware networks that sense their own data throughput as vision of the environment as autonomous networks (subsection 2.3.3).

The other important legacy of the AQE and SCK has been as citational good practice exemplars for the IOT, smart cities and citizen science. Salim & Haque (2015) describe the AQE as an example of “citizens using and deploying IoT systems themselves” (p.34).

Fernandez (2013) use the AQE to claim that “the smart city becomes real when people can deal with open technologies to build their own public infrastructure for environmen-tal monitoring” (p.44). The European Commission’s ‘Digienvironmen-tal Social Innovation’ report de-scribes the SCK as an awareness network that enables sustainable behaviour and “empow-ers citizens to improve urban life through capturing and analysing real-time environmental data” (Bria 2014, p.2). The Nesta report ‘Rethinking Smart Cities from the ground up’ gives extensive coverage to the SCK as an exemplar of a “people-centred smart city” (Saunders

& Baeck 2015, p.9). McQuillan (2014a) describes the SCK as creating “sensor citizenship”

(para.3). Capdevila & Zarlenga (2015) use the SCK as an example of a grassroots initiative that can “report to local city governments or to raise awareness of issues that matter to the local community” (p.277). The European Commission report on environment policy uses the AQE as an good practice case study of a “global citizen science project” and describes the device alongside projects by IBM and the US National Oceanic and Atmo-spheric Administration (Science Communication Unit University of the West of England 2013, p.19). Finally Verrilli (2013) suggests the AQE is an example where “the public won the tug-of war” against science about what people need.

What all these citational uses of the devices have in common is that they describe the AQE and SCK devices as a good practice exemplars of grassroots community participa-tion in technology and scientific governance. They are trying to combine the democratis-ing science narrative (subsection 2.3.2) with the autonomous networks narrative (subsec-tion 2.3.3). Yet these reports and papers fail to acknowledge the material problems of the devices, the failure to support community organisation or the fact that the projects defined themselves specifically in opposition to institutional cooperation. Almost none of the reports raise any questions about the real-world impacts of the devices and they are unreflective about using the devices as good practice exemplars. How was it possible to separate the rhetorical success of the devices from their material failure? To understand how these exemplars function, I examine one citation by Kumar et al. (2015) from the peer reviewed journal Environment International:

“There are also community-led sensing networks in operation (Air Quality Egg, 2014), allowing the general public to participate in discussions on air quality.

Compared to analytical instruments for measuring air pollutants, the sensors which are currently available are several-times less expensive and are easy to deploy, operate and manage. Retrieving data from the sensors is straightfor-ward and their automatic operation allows for wide-spread deployment in the built environment. The use of sensors in this way provides granularity, which better informs the identification of pollution sources and helps support more conclusive studies on the effects of air pollution on socio-ecological justice and human quality of life” (p.201).

The quote mentions the AQE only very briefly and uses it to string together a wide-ranging argument about socio-ecological justice. While the text creates only the loosest of asso-ciations with the device, the fact that the AQE exists discursively as a citable exemplar means that it provides legitimacy to the author’s otherwise unsubstantiated argument. It does not matter that the actual material practices of the device do not support the argu-ment being made by the author. In this use of the device as rhetorical exemplar, these material practices are absent. I would like to describe this as a ‘minimal exemplar’, since it creates only the most minimal connection to the device in order to make its rhetorical point. My suggestion is that the AQE and SCK are largely used as these minimal exemplars across mainstream media, grey literature, academic publications and European Commis-sion reports.

An insightful analysis of the AQE and SCK devices has been carried out by the anthro-pologist Dorien Zandbergen who argues that the devices are ‘storytelling’ devices, that

are “told regularly at Smart City conferences, in books and on websites” (Zandbergen 2015). She argues the goal is to promote smart city agendas while deliberately avoiding talking about the friction, contestation and negative impacts of the technologies. She argues the storytelling about the devices involves a highly selective narrative that “smart cities are currently being built by ‘smart citizens’, working with cheap, accessible sensor technologies and free data platforms, creating and freely sharing data for their own pur-poses, commanding significant changes in their environment” (ibid.). She suggests these narratives aim at a kind of ‘astroturfing’ that make it appear that smart city technologies are being created as bottom-up processes rather than being imposed on the public. I observed many AQE contributors and device backers making these same arguments. My suggestion is that the imposition is not necessarily in terms of physical technology but in the way it brackets particular realities of environmental sensing where ‘matter’ no longer matters. The effect is an ontological politics where the rhetorical reality of minimal exem-plars and storytelling becomes separated from the material practices of the devices and thus unaffected by their failure.

The dramatic impact of this can be seen in a report published by the Waag Society about the Amsterdam deployment of the SCK (Henriquez et al. 2016). The report consists of two parts, with the second part outlining the significant problems of the SCK deployment.

While the first part is full of aspirational rhetoric such as, “citizens can become smart, en-gaged, and illuminated through mastering the technologies that help them express them-selves, connect to others, share their resources and thoughts so they can decide the best course of action” (p.17). What is striking is the way the two parts of the report seem to contradict each other. It is as if the rhetoric of smart citizenship and the problems of the deployment exist as ontologically separate realities that run alongside each other but do not interface. The report quotes an expert as saying that the Amsterdam deployment is merely a beginning, while in the future the sensors will work properly (p.25). What is im-portant here is that the reality of the material problems exists merely in the present, while the rhetoric of smart citizenship exists as a future that is treated as totally separate. In this way participatory sensing seems to be largely a future gazing practice that Bell and Dourish have described as ‘proximate futures’ (Bell & Dourish 2006), where technologies are deferred into the future and don’t need any analysis of the current reality. My argu-ment is that this anticipatory rhetoric provided the strength for the AQE and the SCK to

gather publicity but it also brought with it an ontological politics that meant it could not analyse its own material practices.