Personal, public: using DIY to explore citizen-led efforts in urban computing

As communities develop technological literacy and explore how technology can impact their lives, the future of urban computing will come from grass-roots initiatives in addition to traditional top-down urban planning. To this end, we aim to engage the do-ityourself (DIY) community in exploring how individuals can add technology to their communities. As design probes into this space, we have built prototype devices around off-the-shelf technology, open-ended interactions and simple engineering techniques familiar to the DIY community. Through evolving these devices with both the technical DIY community and Pittsburgh’s local communities, we hope to spark citizen-led efforts in bringing novel applications of computing to our communities.