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. Update on Project Activities
We began the week with an all-team check-in with Daniela from Brightline and Katie from Clarity on Monday morning, and since then, we’ve made considerable progress on our tasks, submitting a first draft of the “Basics of Air Quality” section of the introduction booklet and final drafts of the educational campaign flyers. Introduction Booklet During Monday’s meeting with Daniela, Maya was able to run through her outline for the booklet and confirm that it was in line with Brightline’s vision. Bringing together Meiling’s class presentation as well as the team’s newfound knowledge from informational interviews (which she also compiled into one document), Maya completed a draft of the “Basics of Air Quality” which she sent to Eddie and Daniela on Friday evening. She intends to finish the sections detailing the scope of the project as well as actionable steps that community members can take this weekend, so that next week the team can solicit feedback from SRO tenants and discuss formatting. Flyer / Social Media After our meeting with Pratibha last week, Tori and Dani have applied the final edits to the CCSROC flyers that will be hung up in store windows around SoMa and the Tenderloin. Designed to highlight Brightline’s air quality monitoring program, the changes to the flyer better call attention to the main takeaways about the program.After incorporating Pratibha’s feedback, the flyers are a lot less text-heavy and instead rely on visual design and bullet points to convey the information. They provide quick information about the air quality monitors and feature a large QR code to lead tenants to the air quality map of AQI data from the Clarity sensors. Data Template Thus far, analysis of the data has been somewhat consistent with previous observations, though with a few new developments and shifts in where peaks are -- higher AQI peaks and averages around the Tenderloin District, though still with wider, more drastic ranges seen in Chinatown. As elaborated upon in the following, looking into emissions sources to cross-reference this data will be highly informative. In addition to evaluating the AQI data from the Clarity sensors, Katie suggested that we also compile a list of emission sources in the area to cross-analyze with the data. To do this, Patricia and Dani have started and will continue to add to a list of busy traffic intersections, known diesel generators, and large construction sites across SoMa and the Tenderloin. Using this information, we will better be able to understand the data and draw conclusions about why there may be a spike in AQI in certain parts of the city or during certain parts of the day, such as during rush hour. Surveys As we look to next week, some of our next focuses will be on redesigning the surveys for SRO tenant leaders. Using the insights we received from the SRO tenant meeting, we will begin to make edits to these surveys. We hope to make them more eye catching and intriguing to residents and to place more of a focus on their current air quality situation (the previous survey focused more on the impact of the wildfires on air quality). By making these adjustments we hope to increase resident participation in these surveys and to collect responses that adequately meet and address the current problems and needs of residents. As we plan to have more media coverage about the work Brightline is doing, another thing we plan to include in the survey is what media outlets (newspapers, radio stations, TV, social media pages, etc) community members engage with the most. Patricia was thinking it would be meaningful for the community see their stories reflected in the media they care the most about. Informational Interviews This week we made more progress on our informational interviews, during which each of us compiled questions tailored to our interviewees and posed questions to learn about these individuals’ experience and knowledge on air quality and environmental justice related areas. From our interviews, we collected information that expanded our knowledge on air quality and EJ so that we can better carry out our work for Brightline. We compiled the notes from our informational interviews into one document that we will deliver to Brightline at the end of the quarter as an additional deliverable. Hopefully, these interviews will facilitate connections between Brightline Defense and Stanford researchers that persist beyond this quarter. What We Observed and Learned The deliverables have really come together this week as we approach the end of the quarter; as we continue to work on them, our team has observed the synthesis of the private sector (Clarity), the non-profit sector (Brightline), academia (the professors we’ve interviewed), and community groups (CCSROC and CYC). We believe this collaboration has powerful implications for how we can collectively move towards environmental justice, and are honored to be a part of this work. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward While our project with Brightline isn’t necessarily directly related to housing, it has been interesting to see how the history of housing in the Bay Area has shaped Brightline’s work with SRO tenants today. Past zoning decisions to place low-cost SRO hotels adjacent to busy highways is directly tied to the unique air quality concerns that residents face in SoMa and the Tenderloin, and thus, it was these very housing decisions which gave rise to Brightline’s environmental justice efforts in the area. On top of this, SRO hotels haven’t necessarily been maintained or updated since their construction following the 1906 earthquake, so the lack of air filtration systems in these buildings often means that residents have to keep their windows open despite unhealthy air conditions outside. This means putting themselves at additional risk of respiratory disease and other health concerns. Similar to the case of Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis, these conditions only underscore the importance of actually maintaining affordable housing rather than just constructing it and leaving it be. These realities made our group reflect on the importance of revitalizing the existing housing stock in the city, as Preston and Joyce touched on during their presentation on Wednesday. In the next week, we look forward to making further progress on our deliverables and hope to solicit feedback from SRO tenant leaders. We are also in the process of scheduling a meeting with Ka Yi and Sharon of CYC, which should provide further context on the needs of the community. Update on Project Activities
As we continue to work on different educational materials to help inform community stakeholders about Brightline’s air monitoring program and about air quality science itself, our team has been taking the steps to better educate ourselves on these topics and better understand how we can translate them into more digestible content. Informational Interviews A large piece of this process has been conducting informational interviews with different professors across many different departments at Stanford. Patricia had a meeting with Professor David Gonzalez of the Emmett Interdisciplinary Program in Environment and Resources, and learned about his research on the detrimental effects air pollution had on birth rates for women in Southern California. Our conversation focused on what data to look at, as well as how to communicate findings in an accessible way. Professor Gonzalez also kindly offered to write some of the code for the data analysis. In addition, Dani conducted an interview with Professor Lynn Hildemann of the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department. Given her background in researching air quality science and its impact on urban communities, Lynn provided a helpful overview of the most important takeaways of air quality science for the everyday person. Lynn also has experience serving on advisory committees for the Bay Area Air Quality Management District and for the California Air Resources Board, so she gave us some tips about how to use the air quality data to better advocate for policy reforms like car-free streets or clean buses, for example. Maya met with Professor Marshall Burke in the Department of Earth System Science to discuss his research on the hidden health costs of wildfire. He provided insightful context on the effects of air pollution on cardiovascular and respiratory health, as well as things we don’t often think about, like test scores and mental health. He was very interested in how the data resulting from this project will be used and how future study could address indoor air quality; Maya is going to connect him to Eddie and Daniela via email for potential future collaboration. Looking ahead, Tori has been working to set up an interview with a professor about air quality and was able to secure a potential interview with Lisa Patel at the Sean N. Parker Center for Allergy and Asthma Research. Introduction Booklet Maya is pre-writing the booklet, pulling preliminary information before she begins working on a final draft with the actual language. Clarity’s Chief Operating Officer Meiling Gao made an incredibly informative presentation to the Sustainable Cities class that Maya is drawing on for the “Basics of Air Quality” section. In addition, Maya (along with Tori, Patricia, and Dani) was able to meet with CCSROC leader Pratibha Tekkey on Friday morning, and she provided useful context on the needs of the SRO tenants; many of them speak Spanish, Arabic, and Cantonese as a first language, and have limited reading and writing capabilities in English. As a result, the language of the booklet will be most useful if it is short and to the point, with lots of visuals. This is useful knowledge for our team as we move forward; Pratibha is also willing to connect us with tenant leaders so they can provide feedback before we finalize the deliverable. Data Template Connery has been continuing to look through and record data from the Clarity air quality system, putting together a spreadsheet to replicate the overlaid graphs on the website. So far, the clearest distinctions have been peaks in AQI at the morning and evening in each day regardless of location, and that the areas tend to have relatively similar AQI levels as well, though Chinatown’s tend to be slightly more drastic in range, and the Richmond District’s sensor has the highest peaks on average. Flyer / Social Media Tori and Dani have been continuing with the flyers that will be put up all around SoMa and the Tenderloin, and they’ve been working with Eddie and Daniela to apply edits to the flyer’s first drafts. Tori has also been in communication with the Brightline leads and the CCSROC lead Pratibha through email and a meeting in which we received feedback on our work so far so that we can make adjustments for the final product. Moving forward, we may work with Pratibha to schedule direct meetings with SRO tenant leaders to hear their thoughts on what information may be most important or most relevant for the tenants in their buildings. Pitching to local news outlets Patricia met with Eddie and Daniela to discuss story angles to pitch to local news outlets. This week, she is pitching to the Stanford Daily about story featuring the Sustainable Cities class, and to the San Francisco Chronicle about the inaccessibility of "low-cost" air filters such as Purple Air, and what Brightline is trying to do to address that inequity. What We Observed and Learned From these latest project activities, Tori has learned the value of collaboration. By working with other members within our team as well as collaborating with the Brightline team to receive feedback on our work so far we have been able to produce better and better work. Additionally, the in-class presentation from Clarity and Brightline this week allowed her to get further insight into the science behind air quality and the aims of this monitoring work which will allow her to be better informed and more effective as a Brightline team member. Dani found the meeting with Pratibha particularly eye-opening, as talking with Pratibha about the real-word logistics — how the flyers would be distributed, where they would be posted, and who would be reading them — made her reflect more on how these details should influence the design of these materials. She has found it to be an interesting cycle, a back-and-forth of drafts and feedback, as it is a balance of offering her skills and creating new designs and templates to show the SRO tenant leaders, but at the same time, not creating too much without first hearing the SRO tenant leaders’ input. For instance, Tori and Dani had come up with different drafts of a flyer that included a small paragraph of educational information about AQI science. However, Pratibha noted that many of the people actually reading the flyers may not speak English or may feel as though such a poster looks too much like an advertisement. Thus, we discussed ways to make the language on the flyers — something that initially seemed relatively straightforward — more friendly and local to the neighborhood so as to make them appear more personalized and more helpful to the community. For example, instead of a flyer that reads “Have you seen one of these?” with an image of a Clarity sensor on it, Pratibha suggested re-wording it to “Have you seen me in the TL?” Maya also found Prabitha’s insight provided critical framing for how to make the introduction booklet similarly accessible and relevant. In her conversation with Professor Gonzalez, Patricia learned the importance of reviewing literature of work that has already been done when it comes to studying air quality and the impact it has on marginalized communities. She found it very valuable to learn about Professor Gonzalez's research methods and how he is able to find patterns in his data. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward Hearing from members of Brightline, Clarity, EJ Solutions, and Oakland Climate Action Coalition, really strengthened our group’s understanding of the larger context of our work. Brightline and Clarity allowed us to see the science behind air quality monitoring and the impact that this work hopes to have on communities. The knowledge that we gained from this presentation, alongside our continuous learning as we work with Brightline will help to not only further educate us so that we can share our knowledge of air quality with the community in simple digestible formats, but it also inspires us to be impactful leaders in the way that these organizers are. Clarity's presentation will be very helpful as we create informational material for Brightline. Furthermore, Wednesday’s presenters allowed us to frame our work in the context of environmental justice as a whole, and see how other organizations are working to improve the environmental conditions of marginalized communities. This will help us to have a better understanding of the wider impacts of EJ work and how we can incorporate different organizations’ strategies and perspectives into our work. Tori really enjoyed being able to hear from these organizations this week and learn from the leadership and action they are taking in these communities. She hopes that she will be able to apply some of their expertise and problem solving skills as we continue our work with Brightline so that she can better understand and engage with these communities. Update on Project Activities
Patricia is working on an InDesign template for the informational booklet. She has also scheduled a meeting with Professor David Gonzalez to learn about his research on environmental impacts on communities of color. Maya has begun drafting the copy for the introductory informational booklet on air quality science, and is working towards completing a preliminary draft by this weekend. She has signed up for Professor Marshall Burke’s office hours (initially for this week, but rescheduled for next week) to conduct an informational interview, which she hopes will inform edits of the booklet so that it is scientifically comprehensive. Dani has been working on creating visual content for Brightline’s social media accounts and flyers such that they maintain a consistent “brand” across the educational campaign. She designed four Instagram infographics with answers to FAQs about the Clarity sensors and about air quality science, and she worked with Tori on re-designing the CCSROC flyers which will be hung up in small businesses and storefronts. Now, she is working with Daniela to incorporate feedback and make final edits. The template spreadsheet for data entry across sensors from around the Bay Area is in place. Connery is continuing to fill it out so there is a wider range of data than the two-day span available in the website. Connery has also sent a voicemail to his faculty contact, as well as an email to gain more information if an interview simply is not possible. Tori completed the FAQ final edits last week. She worked with the social media team this past week to develop a detailed communications strategy that provided an overview of the content we intend to post on our bi-weekly social media posts. Additionally, she and Dani have been collaborating to create the CYC and CCSROC flyers that will be posted in these two communities, providing them with information on air quality data and the QR code to check their air quality. What We Observed and Learned Connery has learned that the dataset currently available covers a relatively small timespan for any given time it’s observed, so any databases resulting from it need to be constantly updated, or there needs to be some functionality for finding the place the data is stored in the Clarity website. Tori has learned the value of capitalizing on our teams individual and shared skills. Through working with other members of the team, who have various skills, she has learned how valuable it is to have several different abilities and how we can use this variety to our advantage when collaborating on our projects. She has also observed how Brightline operates in terms of their social media network and their flyers and how she can both learn from their foundation and build upon it to improve some of their outreach strategies and materials. Maya has also appreciated the ways in which our team’s different strengths compliment each other. Our combined skill sets match nicely with the deliverables we are tasked to create for Brightline, and the delegation of different tasks as outlined in our Scope of Work has led to a very productive working environment thus far. Dani has learned more about the different stakeholders who rely on Brightline’s educational materials. By creating content for social media audiences, CCSROC tenant leaders, and CYC youth, she has better learned about catering to each group’s specific needs. This has only made more apparent the vast amount of information there is to convey about air quality science and about the Clarity sensors — all of which is central to Brightline’s air quality monitoring program. However, condensing all of that information to be accessible and digestible can be a challenge. Critical Analysis/Moving Forward Moving forward, Tori hopes that we can continue profiting from our weekly Wednesday meetings which have allowed us to touch base and work together on our projects. She hopes that by continuing to carve out time for our projects and utilizing each other and our project leaders as resources, we can continue to produce great quality work in a timely manner. Patricia's favorite part about the work so far is meeting the people that this impacts. She really enjoyed being at the SRO tenant meeting and was glad to see that their perspectives were being centered. Maya’s favorite part of this project is the creation of educational materials, and she is thinking through ways to make them as accessible, relevant, and helpful as possible. The team has discussed making the introductory informational air quality booklet available to schools and teachers as part of our distribution efforts; moving forward, Maya is considering also developing a supplementary lesson plan that could be available to teachers and parents and work in tandem with the booklet. She will suggest this idea to Eddie and Daniela after the draft for the booklet is complete. Unfortunately, one of our teammates was no longer able to continue with the project, so one challenge from the past week has been re-calibrating as a team to adapt and re-distribute some of the tasks. Lizzie offered a great deal of community organizing experience and graphic design skills, so we have been working together to come up with ways to adjust our responsibilities and stay on track with our timeline as much as possible. In terms of connecting our work to the readings and topics in class, one reflection we had upon reading Plan Bay Area is that Brightline’s project is addressing a niche that might be overlooked at a regional level. When listing environmental achievements, Plan Bay Area shares that regional annual particulate matter concentrations decreased by 39% between 1999 and 2015, adding a year to the lifespan of Bay Area residents. But which Bay Area residents? This statistic does not address disparities in air quality within the region. Because Brightline has a more focused scope on specific neighborhoods, the data our team will analyze over the course of the quarter will shed light on the ways air quality can differ within a region -- which will hopefully lead to beneficial sustainable policy outcomes. The Brightline Air Quality Monitoring Project is an example of the kind of good that results from the cooperation of government, non-profits, and community members! 1) What we've done so far
|
Archives
November 2020
Categories
All
|