The Spatial Information Design Lab is co-directed by Laura Kurgan and Sarah Williams. It conducts research on the localized and regional effects of air pollution and traffic regulations using spatial data and analysis. This includes studying the impacts of factory shutdowns and reduced power plant capacity on carbon monoxide and particulate matter levels in Beijing during an August 2004 period with strict alternate-day traffic restrictions.
18. LOCALIZED EFFECTS REGIONAL EFFECTS CARBON MONOXIDE PARTICULATE MATTER + over 3.3 million cars were removed from city streets on alternate days traffic regulations. + one of China’s busiest steel centers, about 90 miles from Beijing, order 267 businesses to suspend operations. + factories shutdowns were widespread among the region. Including closures in Hebei and Tanjain. +electric power plants reduced capacoty
37. In Mumbai slum of Rafiq Nagar there may be No garbage pickup along the rocky, pocked earth that serves as a road. No power except from haphazard cables strung overhead illegally……And not a single toilet or latrine for its 10,000 people…. Yet nearly every destitute family in the slum has a cell phone. Some have three. (Arab News Nov. 1 2010)
38. 2 market based data is now being stored at a spatial scale that is unprecedented . .... it allows for highly detailed analysis but it takes data literate professionals to understand the information.
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41. 1 Call for data literacy : open data means we have more access to it we need people skilled in analyzing, collecting, and visualizing it. 2 Call for government policies : If he majority of our data is now being stored by private organizations we need to create policies that allow us to analyze this for the “public good”.
Editor's Notes
After two years of work and an extensive collaboration between a criminal justice activist, anarchitect, an urban planner, and graphic designer, our work was included in a show at Moma and made it’s way into the collection. The image has not appeared in information aesthetics, dataflow and beyond, probably because you think of the content of the image before it’s aesthetic.
