News

“Wiring a City”: A Sociotechnical Perspective on Deploying Urban Sensor Networks

Abstract

We use a sociotechnical perspective to expand upon prior characterizations of deploying end-to-end urban sensor networks that focus primarily on the technical aspects of such systems. Via exploratory, semi-structured interviews with those deploying a number of urban sensor networks in a single American city, we identify ways that human decision-making and collaborative processes influence how these infrastructures are built. We synthesize these findings into a framework in which sociotechnical factors show up across the phases of data collection, management, analysis, and impacts within smart city projects. Each phase can display variability in immediacy, automation, geographic scope, and ownership. Finally, we use our situated work to discuss a generalizable tension within smart city projects between cross-domain data integration and fragmentation and provide implications for CSCW research, the design of smart city data platforms, and municipal policy.

Reference

Lucy Van Kleunen, Brian Muller, and Stephen Voida. 2021. “Wiring a City”: A Sociotechnical Perspective on Deploying Urban Sensor Networks. Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction 5, CSCW1, Article 178 (April 2021), 22 pages. doi:10.1145/3449252

@article{10.1145/3449252,

author = {Van Kleunen, Lucy and Muller, Brian and Voida, Stephen},

title = {"Wiring a City": A Sociotechnical Perspective on Deploying Urban Sensor Networks},

year = {2021},

issue_date = {April 2021},

publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},

address = {New York, NY, USA},

volume = {5},

number = {CSCW1},

url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/3449252},

doi = {10.1145/3449252},

abstract = {We use a sociotechnical perspective to expand upon prior characterizations of deploying end-to-end urban sensor networks that focus primarily on the technical aspects of such systems. Via exploratory, semi-structured interviews with those deploying a number of urban sensor networks in a single American city, we identify ways that human decision-making and collaborative processes influence how these infrastructures are built. We synthesize these findings into a framework in which sociotechnical factors show up across the phases of data collection, management, analysis, and impacts within smart city projects. Each phase can display variability in immediacy, automation, geographic scope, and ownership. Finally, we use our situated work to discuss a generalizable tension within smart city projects between cross-domain data integration and fragmentation and provide implications for CSCW research, the design of smart city data platforms, and municipal policy.},

journal = {Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact.},

month = apr,

articleno = {178},

keywords = {smart cities, sociotechnical system, civic data, urban sensor networks}

numpages = {22},

}

Research Team/Authors

Picture of Lucy Van Kleunen, with a city skyline in the background.

Lucy Van Kleunen

PhD Student, TMI Member

Computer Science
CU Boulder

Brian Muller

Faculty Advisor

Environmental Design
CU Boulder

Photo of Stephen Voida

Stephen Voida

Faculty Advisor, TMI Director

Information Science
CU Boulder

Resources

Download PDF (Authors’ Version)
ACM Digital Library Entry
Related Research

Related Research


Updated Site!

Hello! We’ve updated our site. Feel free to check out any of the projects we’ve been working on. If you have any questions, comments or jokes, feel free to contact us. On that note, congratulations to everyone submitting their CHI papers today. We are proud of the work you’ve put into them!

-TMI Team