Citizen Sensing Toolkits

Ling’s work in this category explores citizen sensing: how people can make sense of and act on complex urban issues through their own subjective perception, using their bodies as instruments of data collection. At the centre of this work is SUPERPOWER!, a set of digital toolkits, consisting of gesture-sensing wearables, a mobile app, a web platform, and a data dashboard, that enables communities to make sense of self-determined issues by collecting data on their own city using body gestures and deliberating on the findings individually and collectively. Past projects have explored topics including air pollution, public safety, wheelchair accessibility, gender representation, cultural diversity, children’s well-being, and perception of safety during the COVID pandemic across the UK, Europe and Africa. This practice is underpinned by WearON, a prototyping platform that lets wearable designers connect their devices quickly and simply to a smartphone, the web, and each other, providing the technical infrastructure behind this kind of rapid, community-facing toolkit development.