Big Data for Small Places wins Global City Teams Challenge Leadership Prize

2016

Supernormal applies our interdisciplinary Big Data for Small Places research in the Social Computing Group at the MIT Media Lab in practice. Our urban sensing project, prototyped in the wild in Boston’s Downtown Crossing in collaboration with the City of Boston as the Local Sense Lab, won a 2016 Global City Teams Challenge award. This applied research project explores a public-private partnership to develop technology to enable rapid feedback loops between design interventions and impact in the public realm; the view the invisible pulse of our urban life together. The hyperlocal testbed uses emerging urban data sources and the development of a local sensing platform to increase the meaningful inefficiencies of urban life rather than optimize for the efficiencies common to smart city interventions. Check out a video of the research and development behind the prize here: Placelet is a technology platform for collecting, analyzing, and visualizing data on the human experience of urban places.