Over the last 10 years, the lab has been gathering annual cohorts of teachers from Pittsburgh school districts - as well as from other parts of Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Ohio - to develop fluency with data and technology that they can then pass on to their colleagues for use in the classroom. The Smell M圜ity app relied on human sensors, not machines.”ĬREATE Lab’s long-term collaborations with community groups have allowed it to respond to immediate needs, such as the current mandates for social distancing due to COVID-19. Hear Me was very centered on storytelling. The data piece, the science piece, the engineering piece - each is just one aspect of what we can analyze. “It’s a blend of hard sciences, engineering, mixed with humanities and arts education. The approach also requires a commitment to collaboration among academic disciplines, which means CREATE Lab is transforming the university itself. But is there a tool we can provide to help? That’s where the engineers and tinkerers in the lab get to flex their muscles and say, ‘Well, what if we had this?’” “We’re providing tools to help people find their own solution. “We’re not providing solutions,” he says. What this “citizen science” model results in, says Ryan Hoffman, a project manager at the lab, is less of a focus on delivering solutions to communities, and more on helping them achieve their goals. When the city was in the process of selecting a new chief of police, the opinions of youth who had taken part in Hear Me were gathered and presented to the selection committee - an important instance of bringing young people into the political process. Those stories were then made available to the public via kiosks that took the form of a speaker inserted in a soup-can-and-string “telephone” installed in multiple sites around the city, from parks to street corners to coffee shops. For this project, volunteers spoke to thousands of young people around Pittsburgh, getting a sense of their urgencies and concerns about a variety of issues. Other projects, including Hear Me, are more analogue in orientation. What this “citizen science” model results in … is less of a focus on delivering solutions to communities, and more on helping them achieve their goals. (The coke works was eventually shut down.) This visual data, along with data collected from affordable air quality monitors placed in residents’ homes, as well as real-time reporting of bad smells collected on an app called Smell My City, meant that ACCAN’s concerns would be taken seriously by the EPA. In the face of concerns by Allegheny County Clean Air Now (ACCAN), an environmental group, that a local coke works was violating EPA regulations, a PhD student at CREATE Lab devised an algorithm that used video cameras to detect when the plant was emitting pollutants. Some, including Breathe Cam, have used cutting-edge tech to quantify everyday problems. The idea is to allow the people who know their neighborhoods best to decide what might help them in their own advocacy - and develop tech solutions in response.įounded in 2000 by Illah Nourbakhsh, who was joined in 2009 by two other lead researchers he had collaborated with at NASA’s Ames Research Center, Randy Sargent and Anne Wright, CREATE Lab has taken on a wide range of projects that are notable for their interdisciplinarity and human-centered approach. Determined to avoid traditional approaches of “community engagement,” where researchers drop in to a place, decide on residents’ needs, and create “solutions” more beholden to their own tech interests than to what might improve the quality of life for the people who actually live there, CREATE Lab seeks to develop meaningful relationships with community organizations and advocacy groups from the get-go. How can science, technology, and engineering serve the needs of people in our communities who are advocating for more perfect justice? That question is at the heart of CREATE Lab (Community Robotics, Education and Technology Empowerment Lab), a unit of Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh.
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