Introducing

living dhaka,

a social technology experiment to measure activity in the city

tiger tags

a tiger tag is just a piece of paper with a qr code embedded with a unique but anonymous id e.g.
bengaltiger445

Living Dhaka

when an individual carries it, he or she becomes a tiger who can then be tracked by smartphone carrying volunteers.

one scan can log a host of information on those tigers

4:59 pm (time) smiling (happiness)

23.70, 90.44 (location)

walking (transport mode)

which can then be sent into the cloud and aggregrated to produce measurements like the following which we tested at mit

Living Showcase at MIT | Nov17,2011

where the tigers roamed when the tigers came and went, how long they stayed

what the tigers were interested in

the relationship btwn what they liked and where it was located

Living Showcase at MIT | Nov17,2011

6 smartphones, 8 volunteers, 140 tigers total cost - $200 (t-shirts, printing zebra tags, phones borrowed) development time 4 (long) days, 1-2 people

50 smartphones, 100 volunteers, x tigers? total cost - $10-20,000 wed like to measure things not normally measured (e.g. pedestrian flows, bus ridership, cycle rickshaw flows) and understand how both the measurements themselves and the social process of measurement is received by the city development time 2 months

Living Dhaka | weekofJanuary12, 2012

Living Dhaka | weekofJanuary12, 2012

Old Dhaka Pedestrian Density & Flows

10 AM
experimental design
50 scanners at 25 fixed nodes 3 separate scanning times color of dots = high no. of scans/ minute

1 PM

6 PM
(LARGER SCALE)

main pedestrian corridors

Living Dhaka | weekofJanuary12, 2012

Firmgate Bus Ridership and Speeds

estimated speeds

experimental design
50 scanners @ 6 fixed nodes size of colors represents number of people alighting from those stops from farmgate speed calculated by average of consecutive scans

<5 km/h

tap-outs

5-10 km/h

10-15 km/h

tap-ins

6 PM
(MEDIUM SCALE)

Living Dhaka | weekofJanuary12, 2012

Dhanmondi Lake Happiness and Density Map

experimental design
50 roaming scanners 1 scanning time at peak time blue color = places of highest number of happy people

favorite spots

8 PM
(MEDIUM SCALE)

1 Living Dhaka
baseline measurements of car-free travel in the city

2 Design Your Dhaka

design challenge to improve these metrics in the city most promising ideas will get seed funding and tech assistance to prototype Grand prize for the experiment which improves the metrics the most

pedestrian flows, bus and cycle rickshaw ridership, sidewalk happiness, meeting of rich and the poor

Living Dhaka | weekofJanuary12, 2012

Collaborators
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 Alliances Future of Urban Mobility project. www.mrching.blogspot.com 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 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 Conservancys 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/

Advisors
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.

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. Zias 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.

inspired by the bengal tiger and stripe spotter

appendix

why dhaka?

small window of opportunity to avoid car-centric development but need creative solutions that employ a limited number of smartphones
mobile phones window of opportunity smartphones

penetration

Chicago Sydney

48%

cars

Bangkok Jakarta

auto lock-in line (10-20%)

1% <1%
Dhaka today
time

We have big ambitions . . .

Can the mayor of Dhaka run his city like an MIT scientist managing a lab of experiments?
we are here Feelings Decisions
Data Decisions People Data Visualizations rebranding car alternatives + the city Decisions Experiments -> measurement (through people and phones) Iteration Remeasurement new experiments repeat rinse -> repeat faster

where wed like cities to be

zebra tags

but theres a lot we dont know

finish

4 SUSTAINABLE 3 IMPACT
data -> decisions people data visualizations rebranding car alternatives + the city decisions experiments -> measurement (through people and phones) Iteration Remeasurement new experiments repeat rinse -> repeat faster zebra tags as a store of commercial value integration with mobile payments incentives to motivate users to scan value to local businesses and transport providers

2 MEASUREMENT
start measure pre- and postexperiments how to tell if there is a difference? measure things otherwise difficult to measure how often the rich and poor meet make visible the invisible pedestrians, cycle rickshaws, the poor, the aged

1 SOCIAL TECHNOLOGY
Social will people in dhaka want to be measured? in what format? how should volunteers be organized and motivated?

technology will the technology work as planned in dhaka? how fast can the system be rapidly iterated on and deployed?

Living Dhaka | weekofJanuary12, 2012

1 PRINT QR BADGES 2 DISTRIBUTE TO CITIZENS OUTSIDE TARGET AREA 3 SCAN CITIZENS IN TARGET AREA 4 REGISTER CITIZENS AT NOTABLE POINTS

Measurement Process

Living Dhaka | weekofJanuary12, 2012

1 NO. OF SCANNERS
target is 50 10 teams of 5

2 SCANNING TIME
target is <1 second

3 FIXED vs. FLEXIBLE SCANNERS

fixed

4 SIZE OF MEASUREMENT AREA

single street or few blocks

peak capacity = 50 x 60 = 300 data points per minute, or 18,000 per hour large neighborhood or street network

flexible

Measurement Variables

The Urban Launchpad is a MIT-started social mission-driven company / research lab aspiring to accelerate experimentation and innovation in cities through rapid prototyping and performance measurement on an urban scale