Estación Socio-ambiental * Environmental Traffic Light

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About Estación Socio-ambiental * Environmental Traffic Light

Este grupo reune el proceso de construcción de una estación ambiental que recoge datos por medio de sensores (humedad, temperatura, sonido, CO2) y que son visualizados en distintos displays, facilitando la comprensión de cada fenómeno.

Este proyecto es realizado con wiring (www.wiring.org.co) durante el taller conjunto entre Diseño y Arquitectura "Arquitecturas como interfaces", en la Universidad de Los Andes.

Social-environmental Station (Environmental traffic light)

There are environmental phenomena that are far from the experience and knowledge of people. For instance, when we speak of temperature and give it a value of 25° C we easily have an idea of what does it mean, but when we talk about 2.1ppm CO2 is not the case. The same occurs with phenomena such as humidity, air pressure, etc. which also can not be perceived easily with our senses. For people to understand these phenomena they need to become familiar with them. It is necessary to start thinking about information systems, data visualization and the interaction with them that encourage the understanding and contribute to disseminate this knowledge.

The urban planning has provided rules for issues such as insulation, height, habits, usage and so on, but the equally important facts like the various interactions of the ecosystems in which we immersed are often ignored and neglected.

Just as there are traffic lights that help us regulate traffic both vehicular and pedestrian, why not talk about environmental signals? They could give us information not only from different phenomena but also the environmental state of our ecosystems. We can imagine these lights in different parts of the city, in parks, contaminated or abandoned contexts.

The environmental traffic light consists of a series of units for independent particular phenomena; each unit has sensors and a display that provides visual information to the public on the measurement on the site. The collected data is sent over the wireless network at the University of Los Andes to a server where it is stored for further analysis and future work of the project.

Different information designs will be applied to these data to be displayed, understood and to extract relevant information and support decision making on environmental issues.
For the display of information at the environmental traffic lights new scales and new ways to communicate them have been designed, that are much closer to the human experience, more understandable and generating an interaction experience on the station’s site.

The environmental traffic light is an open project; its designs and processes are public. It is built on the Wiring project wiring.org.co. This project is developed in a series of workshops at the Architecture and Design school, Universidad de Los Andes by professors Hernando Barragan and Felipe Mesa.

On this Web site you can find direct links to the developments, the references and material used in class, as well as the students on each group.

http://designblog.uniandes.edu.co/blogs/dise3123/