Data impressions for a smart city: Exploring new ways to present and engage citizens in environmental data

2.1. Responsible innovation and technology

Responsible innovation has the potential to have a significant impact on people’s awareness of environmental well being (i.e. sustainability-water management, carbon reduction and biodiversity support). In the smart world, it will ensure that we are alive to and addressing the ethical, societal and regulatory challenges of our cities and surrounding environments. According to Voegtlin and Scherer [39, p. 1] ‘responsible innovation that contributes to sustainable development (SD) consists of three dimensions: (1) innovations avoid harming people and the planet, (2) innovations ‘do good’ by offering new products, services, or technologies that foster SD, and (3) global governance schemes are in place that facilitate innovations that avoid harm and ‘do good’. More so than ever, our cities across the world are needing new and responsible innovations to solve the biggest and toughest global warming problem humanity has ever faced. Indeed, all ages of society need to come together to provide/ share knowledge and technologies to reduce human’s impact on the climate. As Häußermann and Schrot [12, p. 1] state ‘the concept of responsible innovation advocates the inclusion of a variety of stakeholders, in particular from society’. However, it is crucial that innovation has the ‘right impacts’... it is believed that responsible innovation can help to achieve this [22].

In the last decade, Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) has earned a prominent position in policy spheres by offering forward-looking approaches [15]. In detail, the notion of responsible innovation suggests that innovators carry additional responsibilities (to society, stakeholders, users) beyond those commonly suggested [37]. Technologies have a big role to play here. In fact, new emerging and creative technological innovations provide the opportunities to not only deepen our understanding and awareness of the growing environmental challenges but also to give us new means to solving them. For example, green design has been advocated and developed in response to the increasingly deteriorating global environment [35]. Eco-design is being used as a tool in the product and service sectors with the aim to increase sustainability and reduce negative environmental impact [38]. Furthermore, when designing and manufacturing products, green design will greatly reduce the environment impact of such production’ [18, p. 1].

In line with this, ‘New technologies not only contribute greatly to society and the economy; they also involve fundamental societal shifts, challenging our values and ideas about ourselves and the world’ [12, p. 1]. Smart technologies have huge potential to be used in creative ways to engage us in rethinking not only our personal behaviours but also our actions as a society. Furthermore, ‘Technologies to identify individual animals, follow their movements, identify and locate animal and plant species, and assess the status of their habitats remotely have become better, faster, and cheaper as threats to the survival of species are increasing’ [28, p. 1]. As Bruynseels [2] notes digitalization of biological populations and ecosystems can change our relation towards them. Emerging technologies are increasingly promoted on the promise of tackling the grand challenge of sustainability [25]. Technologies are enabling more climate change transparency and exposure. In doing so, endeavours like smart cities are enabling the potential for change where all stakeholders can come together to play their role. And as Liu et al. [21, p. 1] state ‘in the current era of Industrial 4.0, open innovation, and the sharing economy, innovation ecosystems are formed through government-industry-university (triple helix) interaction’. The following sections introduce the concept of the data physicalisation approach taken by the Daptec project in relation to the Flat Holm island data, to afford the design of accessible and engaging data impressions through slow data experiences.

3.1. Data and data impression

When the lay person thinks about data, they may think about numbers and statistics in a graph or chart that, whilst important, does not directly effect them in their day to day lives. The Cambridge dictionary definition of data is ‘information, especially facts or numbers, collected to be examined and considered and used to help decision-making’ or ‘information in an electronic form that can be stored and used by a computer’ [5]. However, in terms of not having an impact on us, this is often far from the truth as no matter what we do, we are always consuming, generating and surrounding ourselves with data, our interactions with electronic media being a prime example. A lot of this data may feel unimportant, irrelevant and indeed may never make a noticeable impact on the individual. But this is not the case for environmental data relating to the health and well being of the planet’s ecosystems where serious changes may be occurring in ways which are not directly perceptible to our senses.

A key term relating to data is ‘data accuracy’ referring to the degree to which data is correct. It is one of the main dimensions of data quality which makes data usable and purposeful. As Talha et al. [33, p. 1] notes ‘Knowing the accuracy of an organization’s data reflects the level of reliability it can assign to them in decision-making processes’. As part of the Daptec project’s progress we have begun to explore the notion of ‘data impression’, a term that we use to capture the idea of data impacting the human viewer / audience by way of a kind of imprint or impression left on their understanding of something by data. A data impression is not so much about portraying minute detail as it is about loose, bold and fluent snapshots of the data. Moreover, a data impression does not equal inaccurate data, in fact, the impression is built from a solid and a reliable source of information. But instead of drilling down into the heavy and often non-accessible detail of the data, it is more about building up feelings, thoughts and understanding around the data.

In practical and aesthetic terms, our approach of data impressionism considers the work of impressionist painters of the 1800s where design elements such as shifting effects of light and colour are used to depict an impression of a scene such as can be seen in Impression, Sunrise by Claude Monet (1872). Approaches that we have taken with our physicalisation of data from Flat Holm island have involved combinations of certain coloured lighting and moving materials and reflective surfaces to portray the narrative of a shifting biodiversity. The goal being to increase engagement and accessibility with the environmental and biodiversity data; to provide a way to break down the complex environmental figures/ statistics and make the data experience more tangible and real for the audience.

3.2. Slow data

There is a growing awareness of the importance of real-time data. Real-time processing is a kind of data processing that responds instantly to commands or to the entry of data [27]. And there are many benefits for real time data, for example, it keeps people motivated and informed, it provides more accurate and more timely advice and improves operational efficiency. Real time processing is often described as either soft real-time and hard real-time. Or as Zheng [40, p. 1] highlights ‘There are two categories of technologies accounting for data processing: batching big data and streaming processing, which have not been integrated well’.

The batch data processing method enables a number of transactions to be recorded at once. In their paper Lang & Patel [19] discuss the batch efficiency effects of multi-query optimization to improve response time per query. They [19, p. 7] show that ‘the largest batch size (of 50) results in the largest energy savings with the least amount of average response time degradation’. Essentially the more we can batch our data and the less queries we run on it the less energy that could be consumed. As Geddes [11] describes companies need to start designing for efficiency and entails understanding the companies needs for slow data and quick data and addressing them accordingly. He states that ‘some data is needed more urgently because it sits on that critical path... Other data can either take longer to arrive’. This responsible innovation is advocating the use of the slow data and the batch data processing method as a way to reduce queries on the data and increase energy savings.

In this research, we refer to the soft real time processing or batch processing as slow data. As the Slow Media Manifesto [24] defines ‘The concept ‘Slow’, as in ‘Slow Food’ and not as in ‘Slow Down’, is a key for this. Like ‘Slow Food’, Slow Media are not about fast consumption but about choosing the ingredients mindfully and preparing them in a concentrated manner’. We also consider ‘slow data’ to be design interventions that encourage people to take more time to experience and consider their interactions with data.

4.1. Identifying the stakeholders

At the start of the Daptec project, it was important to identify and understand who the stakeholders of the project were. For this research, a stakeholder is seen as anyone, be it an individual or a group, that influences the success (creation and use) of the data physicalisation. In detail, the Daptec Flat Holm project involved partners from Cardiff Metropolitan University (CMU), Cardiff City Council (CCC), Yard Digital, Techniquest and National Resources Wales (NRW). As primary stakeholders, they all had varying different levels of involvement with the idea generation, sketching, design, development and testing of the data physicalisation. In addition, there were the end user of the data physicalisation, these stakeholders provided feedback on the data physicalisation experience. Their feedback was crucial for the iteration and further design and development of the data physicalisation and how it afforded the data impressions. Essentially, the design centred around what was most engaging and worthwhile for them. As a team, undertaking a stakeholder analysis enabled the pinpointing of the individuals and groups within the partners who would become key players in the design and development of the data physicalisation. By dividing them into groups based on their levels of knowledge, skills and participation, it allowed the Daptec team to ascertain the most effective means of communication to further grow the designs (and ideas) for the data physicalisation.

4.2. Empathising with the data physicalisation users

There was a lot of discussion amongst the team around the target audience and how they as a team would really understand how and what would engage them. In particular, what this audience would potentially be interested in seeing represented through the physicalisation? What would be worthwhile for them to experience? For the team to fully empathise with the targeted audience, a few fictional user stories were created:

I’m a bird specialist. I want to see the different birds that live on Flat Holm and how many that are born and/or living there so that I can make predictions about the future of those species.

The team were focused on trying to understand the data impressions and how the end user would experience these. The above user stories were used as stepping stones into the target users’ shoes to fully empathise with how they would feel and experience the data physicalisation. Cohn [8] proposes a simple ‘role, goal, benefit’ structure for a user story, where ‘the role defines who will directly benefit from the feature, the goal specifies which feature the system should exhibit, and the benefit is the value that will be obtained’ [9, p. 173]. In practice, the user stories helped guide the design and enabled the thinking around how and what should be included in the data physicalisaton in order for it to be as effective and engaging to as many people as possible. The team used these user stories to keep the design on track. As a multidisciplinary team, the user stories brought all the team members onto the same page. They were enablers in the sense that they provided a clear vision and enabled all the team to fully understand the ultimate goal that they were working towards.

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Fig. 1.

General flat Holm island concept map.

In defining the problem, it was important to consider the various different entities that exist upon the island, as well as parts of its history and its status as a State of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI). Figure 1 shows some of the themes that the team considered whilst building a general concept map of Flat Holm island. Part of this process also involved meeting (virtually) with a number of people who were involved with or had some expert understanding of the key themes. For example, the team met with a specialist of the unusual black headed gull found on Flat Holm and some of the numerous volunteers who help keep track of and monitor the numbers of these species of the island. They also virtually met with the island warden, a harbour master from Cardiff Bay and members of Cardiff Council environmental management team to name just a few. Each of these conversations prompted the team’s thinking around the range of intimately linked and wide-ranging themes. As a team, they sought to tie these themes and connections into meaningful narratives that then might work for the data physicalisation. This kind of ‘concept mapping’ [17, p. 284] led to a great deal of spider diagrams, sketches and visualisations as well as physical models in the early stages of the project. Throughout this process the team focused on identifying the engaging and meaningful communication of key narratives relating to the ecosystem of Flat Holm island. For example stories around gull numbers, breeding and eating habits featured heavily in the early thinking, particularly as the team learnt how the recycling habits of Cardiff’s citizens had a direct impact on where gulls tended to look for food. Rare flora, fauna and insect life also seemed a key narrative from the early stages of the project especially as count data relating to the flora & fauna on the island was made available to the team. The general backdrop of the island with its Victorian military barracks, abandoned Cholera hospital and iconic lighthouse immediately made for an engaging context for these narratives. As shown in Fig. 2, one of the early prominent ideas was a figure of a lighthouse – perhaps the most notable landmark on the island. As lighthouses are generally used to signal danger to those travelling at sea, the team focused on the possibility of using lighting effects at the top of a lighthouse structure to represent conditions such as air quality for example. Some of Flat Holm’s history also offered an appropriate contextual reference of technological advancement for the project as it includes the first ever radio signal being transmitted by Marconi in 1897.

In addition to this, the water of and around Flat Holm island featured in quite a few detailed discussions. Some of the thinking was around how the habits of Cardiff’s citizens can impact the water story with factors such as pollution through industrialisation and litter ending up in the water as it flows from inland on the mainland, to the Bristol channel surrounding Flat Holm. Concept mapping helped formulate thinking around the value of water, and sustainability particularly as the team learnt that although the island was surrounded by water, the island warden and other occasional inhabitants can at times consider it to be in short supply, relying as they do on collection of rain water for domestic use. In view of how it is common to take water for granted, we became keen to explore themes relating to the value, availability and possible sources of water in our data physicalisation.

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Fig. 2.

Flat Holm lighthouse sketch.

One of the challenges of the project was the bringing together / strengthening of the contextual narratives with the appropriate data streams to create a data physicalisation that afforded engaging data impressions. Story boarding, a common technique in human computer interaction (HCI) and related systems design (see [34, p. 12]), was a useful tool here. It was an effective way to envisage how the narratives might be told and the data depicted in a congruent and meaningful way that does justice to data accuracy whilst also capturing an engaging impression of the data.

As the ideas evolved two key data physicalisation outcomes emerged. The first of these was a mechanical weather automata. This was a series of rotating prisms that allow for the physical compiling, manipulation and animation of surface textures and images in relation to weather data streams from Flat Holm (see Figs 3a, 3b and 3c). The team developed three physicalisations, one for rain, sun and wind data. These kinetic display boards echo the formal qualities of lighthouse Fresnel lenses, the technological development in lighthouse optics that dates from the early 1800s. With their kinetic rotation, the pieces also have the quality of vintage electromechanical display boards which in our current screen saturated world the team hoped would appear engaging and unusual to a younger (and older) audience. With the use of reflective material on the faces of the rotating prisms, the patterns and optical rhythms which the team created with this outcome generated hypnotising data impressions of weather patterns. In addition to this the prismatic displays are designed to sit above a narrative sceneography of Flat Holm where audience members will be able to make the connection between the weather, and life on the island.

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Fig. 3.

Weather automata prototypes.

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Fig. 4.

Interactive Daptec map prototypes.

The second main line of enquiry that emerged was a large back lit interactive map of the island (using Neopixel multicoloured LEDs, see Fig. 4a) in combination with a series of proximity sensitive interactive props representing different species specific to Flat Holm including the black headed gull and wild leek. The idea here was that the audience would be able to move to the proximity of a particular prop (a gull for example) and see the number and distribution of that species around the island,. One key element of the project that has been developed to support this has been an app that the island warden can use to input the latest count of different species on a regular basis. A touchscreen informative stand has also been designed to provide the audience with some further information about the flora and fauna and their lives on the island.

We have also been keen to integrate and represent the human activity on the island as another ‘species’ and to this end we have explored the island warden’s log book entries. A longer term ambition of the project, beyond this data physicalisation phase, is to experiment with text and sentiment analysis of the log books.

Prototyping has been crucial to the design and development of the data physicalisation, showing what might or might not work, as well as providing opportunities for new and/or evolved ideas. Several prototypes of the data physicalisation were created during different stages of the Daptec Flat Holm project (see Figs 3 and 4). Generally a prototype is understood to be an initial model of a product that is used to communicate to others what the final product may ‘look like...behave like...work like’ [3, p. 424]. On this project, prototypes were used to demonstrate aspects of the physicalisation, partial ideas as well as the more complete experience. In terms of the interactive Daptec map, we can see how the artefacts evolved from quick low fidelity prototypes projected on to the wall to medium and higher fidelity prototypes (see Fig. 4a, Fig. 4b and Fig. 4c). A low fidelity prototype is ‘a prototype which is simple and whose development does not need very much time’ and ‘may be developed using paper and other ‘low fidelity-materials’ [30, p. 778]. This sort of prototyping is very quick and easy to make, possible to make at home (especially, as the team were not able to access university fabrication facilities in the early stages of the project due to Covid-19 restrictions). The low fidelity prototypes provided the team with a physical representation of the data physicalisation for conceptual refinement and improvement. By making these low fidelity prototypes (see Figs 3a and 4a), the team found it easy to see how elements fitted together and to note what may have to be iterated upon for future prototypes. The team found it very effective to make these early, simple mock-ups of the data physicalisation using cheap, easy to get materials. In many instances, precious resources were not wasted and ideas were successfully teased out and shared. As the design stages evolved, more higher fidelity and more complex prototypes were developed as shown in Fig. 3c and Fig. 4c. These began to introduce some of the possible electronic techniques that now feature in the final data physicalisation such as LED lighting systems and touch interaction (see Figs 5 and 6).

4.6. Exhibit fabrication and data

As can be seen in Figs 3c, 4b, 5 and 6 the final approaches developed for the Techniquest exhibit grew from the lines of enquiry and prototypes described above. These were the mechanical rotating prism displays for representing weather data (weather automata) and the back lit map for representing species counts on the island. Both exhibits were developed and fabricated in Cardiff Fab Lab at Cardiff Metroplitan University as soon as Covid restrictions allowed access. The final exhibition artifacts were fabricated using a range of digital fabrication methods (CNC routing, laser cutting, vinyl cutting), open source embedded computing and electronics techniques, and were finished and assembled by hand.

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Fig. 5.

Weather automata final exhibit.

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Fig. 6.

Interactive map final exhibit.

In the Techniquest exhibition, the weather automata is connected directly to a server hosted by industrial project partner Yard Ltd. which receives regular updates from a remote weather station situated on Flat Holm. The weather data (wind, rain and sun index) is normalised to a range of 0 to 10 and sent to the three corresponding automata units (see Fig. 5) which then adjust the rotational position of the prisms accordingly to represent the associated data stream. With a sun, a rain drop and a wind arrow as the main graphic shapes, the different faces of the prisms show either a solid colour (data value of 1), a mirror surface (data value of 0) or a checkered mirror/colour face (value of 0.5) for each of the 10 prisms. Between the static data representations the displays enact a range of transitional behaviours where the reflective surfaces cause physical, optical effects, creating evolving geometries and a play of light. This helps to create the ‘data impression’, an aesthetically engaging and exciting play of visual, physical behaviours that draw an audience in with the aim of providing an overall sense of the current weather on the island.

The back-lit map of the island is designed to represent data on the various species particular to Flat Holm as described above. The species are generally found and counted in particular areas of the island and as such the map is divided into these areas by using light blocking paper material between otherwise diffuse back lighting. This gives an engaging visual effect which combines both highly diffuse colour fields and ‘hard edge’ boarders behind a frosted acrylic map the surface of which has been etched with key cartographic elements of the island (paths, lighthouse etc.). A top layer of clear acrylic cut out icons of the various species being represented adds to the rich dynamic and multi-layered representation and impression of the island and its species. A touch interactive panel allows for the audience to dial up a species and see their representation on the map where the brightness, dynamic movement and density of light will represent species count data. This final link between the custom app (i.e. data collection tool) developed for species count data on the island, and the interactive map in Techniquest has – at the time of writing- yet to be made fully, though the prototype system on exhibition does represent the location of where the island warden and volunteers make the species counts. A longer term aspiration of this prototype is that the map will sweep through a historical set of data before finishing at the latest up-to-date count of a given species. As good quality data is accrued over a number of years via the app, this will show the dynamic rise and fall of species through seasons and years.

The final stages of development of the work for Techniquest focused on making these final prototypes robust enough for public exhibition. This was no easy challenge particularly as a good deal of the audience are children with a tendency to touch and even climb on exhibits. This is mentioned here as it is a concern for any smart city technology particularly if placed in a public arena, that it is robust enough to ensure a long lasting and meaningful interaction with data.