Update on Project Activities
As the end of the quarter quickly approaches, we spent this week focusing on how to bring our project to a close and finish up our final deliverables. We began the week with an all-team check-in with Daniela and Eddie, and since then, we’ve submitted a draft of the data template, designed a draft of the introduction booklet, and finalized the flyers for CCSROC and CYC. Introduction Booklet Maya has been working on translating the copy of the introduction booklet into a Canvas design that will be used for the print version of the booklet. Eddie and Daniela have also requested a digital version of the introduction booklet to be posted on Brightline’s organizational Medium account, so that will be an added element of the final deliverable. She is incorporating the art assets that Eddie prepared into both versions, keeping in mind that Pratibha suggested that comprehensive visual elements will make the booklet more accessible to SRO tenants who speak English as a second language. Flyer / Social Media Our work with Pratibha and CCSROC came to a close as Tori and Dani incorporated Pratibha, Eddie, and Daniela’s final pieces of feedback into the flyer design for SoMa and the Tenderloin. These edits involved creating a Spanish translation for the flyer, as well as reformatting the design for posters of different dimensions. On Wednesday, Eddie and Daniela printed about 500 of these posters, and SRO tenant leaders will soon begin the work of hanging them up in corner stores, residential building lobbies, and office windows. Meanwhile, we also continued working with Sharon and Ka Yi from CYC, as our team was invited to join Brightline’s quarterly meeting with CYC last Friday. During the meeting, we learned more about the work that CYC does in Chinatown and about the ways in which their youth leaders organize events to engage with seniors and educate the community. Learning more about this context helped Tori and Dani in designing the CYC flyers to be more digital-focused rather than print, to be more picture-based so as to reduce / simplify the need for translations, and to include large text that’s readable for seniors. Since the meeting, we’ve been in communication with Sharon and Ka Yi to send over drafts of the flyer and integrate their feedback on content and formatting. Patricia also pitched the story to local media outlets, including the Stanford Daily, SF Chronicle, and NorCal Public Media. Currently, a writer for the Stanford Daily is doing a feature about the Sustainable Cities course. Data Template The most recent progress on making the data template has come in the form of grouping the sensors in the Clarity website. This allows the sensors not only to be grouped by location, but also tagged with their group name and relative address. This allows for the data itself to be organized much more easily to show a day-to-day graph of AQI for all of the sensors. From this comprehensive datasheet, we can see that on the two largest peaks, the SoMa and Chinatown districts had the highest AQI, while the average AQI for all four districts (SoMa, Chinatown, Richmond, and Tenderloin) were all relatively similar across the timescale, around 60. After parsing our data, we will create visualizations for Brightline to display on social media and share with community stakeholders. Surveys Tori and Patricia have been working on the surveys, both the digital and hard copy, to update them to current air quality conditions. Using the feedback that we received from the SRO tenant leaders meeting, we began to edit some of the survey questions to make them more tailored towards the current atmosphere in the community rather than being more focused on the impact of fires as it had been previously. We also added a question about what media outlets tenants engage with most, so they can see their stories represented in media they actually read/watch/listen to. Additionally we worked on reformatting and redesigning the digital survey on google forms so that we could transform the aesthetic as well. Informational Interviews The majority of us have completed our informational interviews in which we were able to compile information from various professors that specialize in science fields with connections to air quality. From these interviews, we each recorded notes which we compiled into a single document. We have begun to organize these notes into a format that we can use in our informational booklet so that we can share the knowledge that we have gathered with the public in a format that we hope will be easily digestible. Final Deliverables In our meeting with Eddie and Daniela, we also discussed the final deliverables that we’ll need to compile in our final memo. These include:
What We Observed and Learned With each week, the value of cyclical feedback and iteration has only become clearer. Dani found the meeting with CYC to be particularly helpful in designing their flyers, as it wasn’t initially clear how they might differ from the flyers we’d designed for CCSROC. However, talking to Sharon and Ka Yi really helped clarify these points as it quickly became clear how the goals and needs of CYC’s audiences would inform their flyer design in a way that was much different from the CCSROC design. For instance, CCSROC’s goals mainly involved increasing awareness of the air quality monitoring program by encouraging residents to scan QR codes and visit the online air quality map, or by informing residents about what the air quality sensors actually do. However, CYC’s goals mainly involved educating the community about the links between pollution, health, and the importance of monitoring air quality. Additionally, CYC’s audience included both seniors and high school students, so the content and formatting had to be generalized for a wide range of age groups. Tori and Dani also came up with several different drafts of the CYC flyer, initially prioritizing large fonts and consequently less text. However, we perhaps overemphasized the need for large fonts and sacrificed too much content, so Eddie and Daniela’s feedback was really helpful. Dani observed that navigating this feedback loop can sometimes be challenging, as different stakeholders may have very many different suggestions at different phases of the design process, and it can be difficult to include all of them on the same 8.5x11 flyer. From this, she learned the importance of not committing to a final design too early, as it’s likely to change a lot with different feedback. Tori learned the significance of making edits to create the best final product, which can be done by taking the impact of multiple reviewers. By taking into account the voices of everyone involved with the flyers and the surveys we were able to develop a better final product that will hopefully match everyone’s desires. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward Our readings about smart cities from this week are particularly relevant to our work with Brightline. It was interesting to see how Brightline’s goals of monitoring air quality data to inform policy decisions and community awareness were directly tied to some of the ideas in Townsend’s paper. We were also able to draw connections between the impact of technology work that we are doing and concepts from the readings. For one, the technology of the air quality sensors themselves are what is providing this data on air quality for these communities. This speaks to the power that technology can have, as touched upon in the readings, to allow cities to adapt and transform to fit the changing needs of society. With these sensors, the communal need for information on the level of pollution in the air is made available to communities as emissions continue to worsen the state of the environment. Technology also has made this information more accessible and we have strategized to create content that capitalizes upon increasing the access of this information. For example, the QR codes on the flyers in addition to the website URL allow local residents to easily check the air quality in their neighborhood. The organization of the Brightline website and social media pages (which we have been creating content for) also demonstrate how technology can improve access to valuable information for communities. Each of these examples demonstrate how technology can improve upon the urban environment in terms of improving access to resources and information for urban dwellers. Additionally, these examples exhibit how we have collaborated with Brightline to utilize technology to enhance accessibility. Moving forward we hope to continue to have a focus on the community and our end goal of connecting them with information and resources that will help them better understand how their environment impacts their health and daily lives. Similar to the Clarity presentation from a few weeks ago, the idea of smart cities also brings about important ethics issues. When it comes to air quality monitoring, for example, one ethical issue that comes up is accessibility. Currently, air quality monitoring is not accessible to low-income families because the cost of air quality monitors such as Purple Air are not affordable. This means that low-income neighborhoods lack access to data that could inform policies that affect their health. This is where Brightline comes in and is trying to make air quality monitoring more equitable. Comments are closed.
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