This is the final of two annual progress reports whose purpose is to provide the means for the commission and external evaluators to assess the progress and outcomes of the Making Sense project, with particular emphasis on the activities carried out in respect of the contract. This report is intended to be complementary to the work package outputs delivered during the reporting period, which are timed to coincide with the main project milestones and focus on the results obtained.
Making Sense – Project Synopsis
The rapid growth of Fablabs and other maker spaces is creating opportunities for citizen-driven innovation in domains ranging from open hardware to digital fabrication, community informatics, and participatory sensing. In the past five years, the broad availability of open hardware tools, creation of online data sharing platforms, and access to maker spaces have fostered the design of low cost and open source sensors that citizens can appropriate to engage in environmental action. By collectively measuring and making sense of their environment, citizens can become aware of how their lifestyle affects the ecosystem and be inspired to adopt more sustainable behaviours.
Official bodies typically measure environmental qualities with sparse networks of high quality sensors, and the resulting data are analysed to inform policy and regulations. At the same time, with the exception of extreme cases like smog pollution, citizens tend to be unaware of the health threats that they are subjected to on a daily basis. Moreover, they lack the means to act on their own behalf. By encouraging and enabling the creation of bottom-up sensor networks, and sharing the resulting data and knowledge, the EU funded project Making Sense aims to add to the available data and understanding, and contribute to a healthier and cleaner environment.
Making Sense aligns six partners, being Dundee University (Scotland), Institute of Advanced Architecture Cataluña (Spain), Joint Research Center (Belgium), Peer Educators Network (Kosovo), University of Twente (Netherlands) & Waag Society (Netherlands) as well as several dozens of local collaborators, in addressing this goal. Together, they show how open source software, open source hardware, digital maker practices and open design can be used by local communities to make sense of their environments. The project has developed a Making Sense Toolkit based on the Smart Citizen platform for bottom up citizen science, developed at Fablab Barcelona, that has been (co-)designed and tested in nine pilots in Amsterdam, Barcelona and Pristina.
Starting from October 2015, Making Sense has
1. Developed a Making Sense toolkit, consisting of open source hardware, software, guidelines and best practices;
2. Developed a framework for a participatory approach to environmental maker practices, which will show how to provide citizens and communities with appropriate ICT and social tools to enhance their everyday environmental awareness, enable active intervention in their surroundings, and change their individual and collective practices;
3. Developed a scientifically informed framework for citizen co-inquiry and action towards hands-on transformation of their surroundings;
4. Disseminated the results to an audience of engaged citizens, community organisers, researchers, policy makers and businesses, inviting them to use and build on our findings.
