Riding a bike around the city of Boston you come to realize quite quickly that the cycle infrastructure is lacking. Even with the declaration by Mayor Menino that in Boston “the car is no longer king” and the cities recent focus on improving the cities cyclability, riding in the city is tough, scary and at times down right dangerous. The infrastructural improvements consist mostly of painted line bike lanes and Sharrows (painted bicycle arrows indicating an acceptable space within the lane a cyclist can occupy). While researching the current conditions I found that the mapping of the cycle infrastructure, and more the experience to be completely lacking. The maps of cycle lanes mainly consist of diagramatic overlays on plain google maps. I realized that there is not a map (at least I have not found one) that has the actual lanes drawn in. This type of mapping is deceiving to the rider as the system that exists is disjunct and rough with potholes and seamed pavement.

My goal first is to begin remapping the city of Boston’s cycle infrastructure to better map the experience of riding in the city. I am currently building a sensor consisting of a GPS and accelerometer to map the micro-topography in the city, additionally the speed, stops, turns and the side to side motion associated with pedaling hard will be used to redraw how open a street feels to the rider, the faster and smoother the ride, the wider the feeling of the street, the slower and more jerky the ride the narrower the feel.

From this I plan to develop an app that, though not as precise as the sensor I am constructing, has the opportunity to crowd source this data, as well as translate it back to the user, in essence creating real time crowd source mapping.

Where I Stand Now:

I am currently trying to convince all of the components of my sensor to start talking to each other. After about 15 hours yesterday I    have come up with a new issue of the card not being read, hopefully that will be remedied shortly. Once that is done I just need to get the accelerometer into the party, we’ll see how that goes.

My hope for this project is that this new mapping will help to inform the urbanization and infrastructural improvements in the city.

Think Big: The cost of waste, both financial and environmental, on our cities is enormous. While the market has produced some solutions in terms of automated sorting for single stream recycling and composting farms, the largest challenge still exists at the moment of disposal. When you or I decide to throw something away where do we throw it? Do we litter? Do we properly compost or recycle? More often than not, even when we want to do the right thing we often carelessly dispose of our waste. I believe that a combination of poor design, entrenched habits, and a lack of awareness contribute to these individual behaviors. I am seeking to change what appear to be small moments in our everyday life in a way that can scale up to significantly impact our urban environments.

Start Small: My initial target is Chauhaus, the dining room at Gund Hall. After experiencing my own fits of misunderstanding every time I threw something away I began talking to other members of the GSD community and found that nearly everyone finds this setup confusing. I plan to change this through one (or more) design and behavior interventions. I am currently assessing a handful of options but plan to implement them as soon as is feasible.

Act Now: I have met with a combination of “trash” people and “behavior” people so far, including Trevor O’Brien of GSD Building Services and Erin Frey (PhD candidate) and Professor Todd Rogers at the Kennedy School. I have a meeting scheduled for Friday morning with Rob Gogan, the department head for Recycling and Waste Services at Harvard. I have also begun filming the trash area from above during lunch times to determine the scope of the problem and establish a baseline to compare to after my intervention.

Villa Victoria community member in front of Betances Mural

This past week after my weekly visit to Villa Victoria and interviewing Anabel Vazquez-Rodriguez, curator and gallery manager in Villa Victoria Center for the Arts, two things became clear. The immigration of non-Puerto Rican groups to Villa Victoria is a recent phenomenon that still have not been mapped or deeply researched. Secondly, the existing monument of the community (Betances Mural) exclusively represents the Puerto Rican population. Today’s Villa Victoria presents a more diverse panorama with a large Chinese community, most of which speak Cantonese  Anabel also mentioned that 2nd and 3rd generations of former residents have moved to the outskirts of Boston, being replaced by other cultural groups. The next step is to unveil this demographic change, and understand how it is or will affect existing community structures. Anabel also brought to my attention a documentary project on Villa Victoria ran this past summer by a grad student at MIT . I am excited to learn more about her conclusions on today’s Villa Victoria. 

LearnIt

Think Big:

To create a quality, affordable, peer-to-peer learning platform. For people who:

-Are driven by a passion to share real-world skills based on his or her individual expertise.

-Have a broad spectrum of interests and want to try something out.

Start Small:

The first phase of the project aims to connect high school students with college students. High school students can get a taste of what college life, figure out what they want to learn in college among a broad spectrum of interests and get prepared for higher education. College students can make some money sharing what they are good at, what they have experienced and what they are learning.

The project would be based in Boston, taking advantage of the great university resources in Boston area.

Act Now:

This week I’ve got in touch with the director for Harvard Secondary School Program, GSD J-term and Career Discovery, GSD Project Link, Flinja. I’m scheduling several interviews with them, trying to find out how they reach out to high school students, what are the connection built that I can borrow, what are the most popular interests from past experience. Meanwhile, I’m conceptualizing the website interface.

I thought I was pretty much underway with my project, however after my desk crit last week it was suggested (gently) that I’m still circling, raptor-like. My original thought was to start collecting video of some lesser known space in Boston and work with the New Urban Mechanics and MyBlockNYC on a mapping project that might show more of the city through more eyes. I’ve also reached out to Ed Walker to talk about publicizing and reinvigorating spaces. I thought I might work with the group who approached Chris and Kate about a project on segregation. But I think I went too specific too fast.

THINK BIG: How do I get people in Boston out of their “space & place” comfort zones? How do I get them to different parts of the city without resorting to games & gimmicks?

START SMALL: I’m approaching this question from a new angle. I’ve reached out to a few non-Bostonians and asked them to create a tour of Boston based on anecdotal and web-based knowledge. I think I’m too ingrained in my own Boston experience to actually think like a tourist, or like someone who hasn’t been to Boston before and it’s giving me tunnel vision.

ACT NOW: This weekend, God help me, I’m going to go on at least one of the devised tours. For all my blustering about knowledge of space, there are more than a few spots I haven’t been in Boston for the sole reason that they’re tourist traps. I’ve never been to Cheers. Who knows? Cheers could be the most amazing place on the planet and I’ve been missing out all these years.

I would dearly love and cherish any thoughts on, and suggestions for, research and people who can help. Again, I’m stuck on this “knowledge of space” thing and I’m not sure where it’s going.

 

This week, I have been working on coding the bike theft map website. It is slowly coming into being. The basic layout and map functionality is completed, and the reporting mechanisms are minimally functional. I hope to complete this part of the project by this week.

In addition, I am scheduling interviews with bike theft victims to better understand the circumstances and explore other aspects of the crime that I have not yet explored. Particularly, I suspect there is a very personal narrative that exists with these events, and want to begin to collect those stories.

In the meantime, I am wondering how to reach out to bike theft victims to get the word out about the mapping tool, as well as collecting interviews. Do you know of anyone who has had their bike stolen? If so, please get in touch!

Think Big:

Design a physical social network in which people of similar interests, ideas, skills are connected through means of the physical environment.

Start Small:

There are currently two paths my research can take me; both of which I am excited about. I am currently pursuing both paths to see if they can soon combine into one.

1) A Physical Social Network in which a location specific object (ie. table within a cafe) is the point of connection between two people with similar interests. In this scenario, people can leave specific ‘traces’ of themselves throughout the city. You can sit at a table and see those who have sat there before you; based on individual layers. This concept begins to form new community boundaries and connections by means of our physical environment.

2) A digital submission process for New Urban Mechanics. I am currently working with the New Urban Mechanics office in developing a way to easily submit ideas, connect with those interested in similar concepts, and immediately connect someone needing a specific skill with someone who has it.

Act Now:

I am simultaneously working to conceptualize a platform for the physical social network while connecting with the New Urban Mechanics office and other companies who are attempting at connecting specific people based on interests, skills, or location. Current connections include:

• New Urban Mechanics
• OurCommonPlace.com at Harvard iLab
• USAdelante at Harvard iLab
• Active Pepper at Harvard iLab
• Ed Walker with Small Cities Movement
• Sociologist Bart Bonikowski
• Connections Group at Berkman Center for Internet & Society

 

Instead of the sticking ideas from the start, in this one week I am bombarded with opportunities (with brief description) to consider:

A.) Ephemeral City (location based app that focuses on nearby and occurring events. Can partner with iLab venture Hottspot http://hottspot.co/ [thanks Stacey] or work with @hyunez’s project to create something substantial together)

B.) OurGoods (work with existing Bartering community to add a layer of physical socializing)

https://ourgoods.org/users/4827/profile

C.) Turf in the Plaza (Ad hoc artificial turf in wide-open plazas to redefine spatial quality. Best to work with New Urban Mechanics.)

D.) PING in the real world. (Projection installation that makes people play Ping in real life.)

http://www.creativeapplications.net/games/ping-augmented-pixel-tutorials-games/

E.) Student p2p support. (Working with HBS startup USAdelante to create Mobile App that bridges students to support each other, as a solution to the overly high ration between students and counselor)

Act Now :

What I must do now is make a choice. I believe I know what the next steps would be for each of the paths.

Think Big:
32 percent: The growth in the number of international students in the past decade.
157,558: The number of students from China, a group that makes up 22 percent of all international students.
23 percent: The growth for all Chinese students in one year.

Chinese students have become a major force in international students in US. What will they learn in the United States? What will they confront? Most Chinese applicants are not aware enough before they come, while there are already so many Chinese students in the United States. One group needs to know, while the other knows. How can we build the linkage between these two groups?

Start Small:
Chinese students in GSD have been growing in the past few years. Currently there are more than 100 Chinese students. Of this 100 students, there are people from different programs, different ages, different backgrounds… Starting from this group, we could begin to understand how the linkage could be established, and how their information could benefit the students after them.

Act Now:
Currently, I’m trying to unit the current Chinese students to let them feel the power of themselves. In the meantime, I’m interviewing students from different program. The talk would be mainly around their academic study (what they expected, what they have learned, what are the challenges, etc)
1. Build a website to record the activities and events of Chinese GSD students.
2. Interview starts from MLA program (first, second and third years)
First Interviewees: GU Zi (2nd year), DONE. DAI Zhewen (2nd year), Appointment 10/2. HAO Peichen (1st year), Appointment 10/5. HAO Shuai (3rd year), Appointment
Expected output: a brochure of their talk & online access
3. Contact applicants in China to see what they want to know. (personal contact & online forum)

This past week we had the opportunity to visit the Villa Victoria housing project in South End. From multiple talks, we learned that the former mostly Puerto Ricans community has changed over time to a more diverse demography.  What used to be a purely Puerto Rican community now has a big Chinese community and other Hispanic ethnics.  Some of the questions raised by this visit were:

How can you reduce segregation?

How can we create conditions that would make people interact outside their own cultural groups?

How can we make people collaborate with people outside their own cultural group?

These questions led to a one-day workshop where Chen Huang (from China) and I (from Puerto Rico) sat down and talked about our cultural backgrounds in order to find common grounds.  The exercise helped us identify three main issues that threaten cross-cultural interactions;  myths, cultural differences, and lack of trust.  In order to create a ground for cross-cultural interactions it is necessary to equip each group with tools to understand and deal with their differences. The image above was a result of the exercise.

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