the urban launchpad: initial design brief
Post on 12-Sep-2014
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DESCRIPTION
MIT-born initiative to encourage experimentation in cities.TRANSCRIPT
Only 1% of people have cars Meet Dhaka
He loves his city and wants to find a way to reduce congestion
Meet Zia
Should he close down the road?
In cities like Fazilka, road closure seemed to counterintuitively reduce congestion
He did once before (but wasn’t sure if it worked)
Before After
Better to do nothing.
To the naked eye, It looked like the experiment was a success – some of the residents seemed to like it. But he couldn’t tell if it was a 5% or 50% improvement. Also, maybe it was because it was a weekend. Maybe it was because petrol prices went up recently. Maybe it was because of the big cricket match the night before. What he did know is that the car owners were not happy. He knew that it cost the city 500,000 taka to monitor and close the street.
Can the mayor of Dhaka run his city like an MIT scientist managing a lab of experiments?
Cities have become too complicated to manage on gut instinct. Measuring a city’s performance can help encourage experimentation. There are no effective, low cost means of quickly assessing a city’s performance.
The Urban Launchpad employs human and mobile sensors to deliver a targeted, low-cost data service for measuring the impact of city experiments
15 million users carry a unique
code
A distributed subset of
smartphone volunteers
marks their spot
city user scanner
walking, happy
bus, frustrated
CNG, content
Two-wheeler, angry
making the invisible visible
LIVING DHAKA
An initiative of the
Albert Ching is an aspiring urban innovator, a lifelong Hawaiian and former Googler based in Mountain View, Hyderabad and Singapore. Albert is enduring the frigid cold of Boston to help cities innovate, specifically by using the proliferation of information technologies to solve transport problems in South and Southeast Asia. He is a researcher for the Singapore-MIT Alliance’s Future of Urban Mobility project. www.mrching.blogspot.com
Muntasir Mamun Imran is a nature lover, adventure-trekker, and an experienced social entrepreneur from Bangladesh. He is the co-founder of Kewkradong Bangladesh, country coordinator for the Ocean Conservancy’s International Coastal Cleanup, and Organizer of the Banff Mountain Film Festival World Tour. He has organized cycling rides throughout Bangladesh including the Sir Edmund Hillary Ride, the Ride for Green, and the LiveStrong Ride. www.muntasirmamun.com/
Collaborators
Stephen Kennedy is a designer and artist formerly based in Atlanta with a background in Industrial Design from Georgia Tech. At first a reluctant transplant to Boston, Stephen has enjoyed trying to escape frigid New England by working as a hybrid planner-designer on signage initiatives in New Orleans, greenway planning in the Bronx, urban realm technology in Thessaloniki, and participatory planning in Indonesia. His focus is on both physical planning and spatial information design. www.stephenjameskennedy.com
P. Chris Zegras is the Ford Assistant Professor of Urban Planning and Transportation at MIT. His research interests include the influence of the built environment on individual travel behavior, transportation infrastructure and system financing, indicators of sustainable transportation, and mitigating transportation greenhouse gas emissions. On these and other related topics, he has consulted widely, including for the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Canadian, German, US, and Peruvian Governments, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, and the United Nations Center for Regional Development.
Advisors
Zia Wadud is an Associate Professor in Civil Engineering at the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET). Zia completed his PhD from Imperial College London in Civil Engineering Policy in 2008 as a Commonwealth Scholar and held research positions at the University of Cambridge and at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Zia’s current research interests are in modeling and valuation of policy interventions in the transportation and environment sector (including climate change policy), modeling energy demand and assessing risk and vulnerability in the context of broader Civil Engineering topics.
Good cities don’t happen by accident.
Living Dhaka Program Requirements manpower 500 volunteers to help register / scan city users (university students) Training for volunteers and marketing campaign for users materials 100-400 Android powered smart-phones QR code printer and collateral (business cards/ T-shirts) T-shirts / hats / food for volunteers Signage and digital projectors technology (being developed at MIT) Mobile application(s) for registering and scanning users Back-end databases for storing, processing, analyzing data
Living Dhaka Proposed Timeline
Jan 15 Launch
Oct 19 Today
Oct - Jan Recruit Volunteers (Dhaka)
Oct 31st Finish 1st Working Prototype of Mobile Apps and Backend (MIT)
Oct 21st - Nov 9th Funding deadline from MIT resources (MIT)
Nov 1 – 24th User testing in both MIT and Dhaka
Nov Identify specific experiments to measure* (Dhaka)
Dec 1st Viral marketing campaign (Dhaka)
Jan 1st Training of volunteers begins
*Related to existing or new experiments in the city to promote alternatives to cars
Jan 8th
Team from MIT arrives in Dhaka
Oct Reach out to NGOs, gov’t officials, & other stakeholders to garner support and evaluate feasibility
Oct-Nov Build MIT-Dhaka working team
Open Questions Feedback on idea and concept esp on pitch clarity
COUHES approval from MIT
Funding sources for Living Dhaka prototype during IAP
User experience – will users participate?
How much data and participation required for data to be useful
Building technology prototype and testing remotely before launch
Identifying and/or deploying city experiments
Government approvals to prototype
Business model
Appendix
Register. Scan. Project.
1 2 3
User experience
An initiative of the
LIVING DHAKA
H
W 2 Hour Commute
Visualize.
User experience
An initiative of the
LIVING DHAKA
Scan.
Scan to download app. Also press to
start the scan.
Scanning mobile application
An initiative of the
LIVING DHAKA
Select transport
mode.
10 seconds (or less).
Send data to the cloud.
Scan QR code.
An initiative of the
Scanning mobile application
LIVING DHAKA
sexy sidewalks
*Potential city experiments
LIVING DHAKA
critical mass cycling
*Potential city experiments
LIVING DHAKA
the best way to see Dhaka
*Potential city experiments
LIVING DHAKA