Wearables and droneS fOr CIty Socio-Environmental Observations and BEhavioral ChangE

Wat kan ‘citizen science’ betekenen voor het verbeteren van de luchtkwaliteit in Europese steden? Dat is de vraag die aan het Europese Horizon 2020-project SOCIO-BEE ten grondslag ligt. Met een consortium van zeventien partijen uit zeven Europese landen werkt HKU mee aan een systeem dat burgers empowert om de luchtverontreiniging in hun directe omgeving bottom-up aan te pakken. Met een speciaal hiervoor ontworpen mobiele luchtkwaliteitsmeter zijn drie pilots uitgevoerd in Zaragoza, Ancona en Marousi. De pilots moeten uitmonden in een overdraagbare toolkit die burgerparticipatie op het snijvlak van wetenschap en beleid faciliteert. Als enige ontwerpers in het consortium, hebben de onderzoekers van de HKU hun expertise vanuit de kunsten en ontwerpdenken ingezet voor het stroomlijnen van processen en het ontwerpen van visuele handvatten.

SOCIO-BEE proposes that community engagement and social innovation combined with Citizen Science (CS) through emerging technologies and playful interaction can bridge the gap between the capacity of communities to adopt more sustainable behaviours aligned with environmental policy objectives and between the citizen intentions and the real behaviour to act in favour of the environment (in this project, to reduce air pollution). Furthermore, community engagement can raise other citizens’ awareness of climate change and their own responses to it, through experimentation, better monitoring, and observation of the environment.

This idea is emphasised in this project through the metaphor of bees’ behaviour (with queens, working and drone bees as main CS actors), interested stakeholders that aim at learning from results of CS evidence-based research (honey bears) and the Citizen Science hives as incubators of CS ideas and projects that will be tested in three different pilot sites (Ancona, Marousi and Ancona) and with different population: elderly people, everyday commuters and young adults, respectively. The SOCIO-BEE project ambitions the scalable activation of changes in citizens’ behaviour in support of pro-environment action groups, local sponsors, voluntary sector and policies in cities.

This process will be carried out through low-cost technological innovations (CS enablers within the SOCIO BEE platform), together with the creation of proper instruments for institutions (Whitebook and toolkits with recommendations) that will contribute to the replication, upscaling, massive adoption and to the duration of the SOCIO-BEE project. The solution sustainability and maximum outreach will be ensured by proposing a set of public-private partnerships.