Meaning from Monitoring: Visualizing heterogeneous data to empower environmental justice communities
The purpose of this research is to identify how web and mobile technologies can be designed to empower communities adjacent to oil refineries to understand and effectively communicate issues with their air quality. Our focus was on providing detailed, explorable quantitative data alongside crowdsourced experiential data to give a holistic depiction of the effects of pollution in the region. Iterating on open-source software tools developed by the Carnegie Mellon University CREATE Lab, we ultimately created a website with detailed, historical and real-time data for chemicals of most concern to communities, and a complementary mobile app which collects and visualizes citizen reports of pollution odors and any accompanying health effects.
The purpose of this research is to identify how web and mobile technologies can be designed to empower communities adjacent to oil refineries to understand and effectively communicate issues with their air quality. Our focus was on providing detailed, explorable quantitative data alongside crowdsourced experiential data to give a holistic depiction of the effects of pollution in the region. Iterating on open-source software tools developed by the Carnegie Mellon University CREATE Lab, we ultimately created a website with detailed, historical and real-time data for chemicals of most concern to communities, and a complementary mobile app which collects and visualizes citizen reports of pollution odors and any accompanying health effects.