Urban Sensing
2016–2020 · Physical Computing
A sensor is not a neutral eye innocently observing the environment. This work builds sensing as a design instrument: physical computing, custom sensors, and responsive prototypes that ask what a landscape does when it can register its own conditions.
Prototyping is the method, and also the argument. The sensing kits are open-hardware assemblies — an Arduino, a GPS breakout, a microSD logger, and a stack of environmental sensors — small enough to sit in a palm and cheap enough to hand out. Each round of soldering, field-testing, and rebuilding changes what the instrument can ask, so the design question and the technical question stay entangled. Because the device is legible and reproducible, measuring becomes something a resident can do, rather than something done to a neighborhood.
The responsive work takes the same sensor logic into space, turning readings that are usually invisible into something a body registers directly. Instrument and installation are two halves of one practice: one asks what the environment is doing, the other asks what it feels like to be inside it.
