In 2009 I had the chance to collaborate with the MIT Senseable City Lab  and the Trash Track project. This experiment triggered my interest in further exploring the potential of 'augmentation' and participatory sensing techniques as tools to allow non-experts to relate to large scale systems and explore opportunities for their transformation from the bottom up. What does it mean to  render an infrastructure visible, present and available for design? It is in fact interesting to notice how protocols, materials, systemic interaction and back-end operations of established industrial systems and infrastructures that ‘define our solution space’ often remain concealed and unquestioned. Counteracting this ‘invisibility’ is, therefore the first step to understand how to possibly transform them to properly address present needs and challenges. The study of waste collection and recycling for instance, revealed a quite scattered world that is far to be optimal from a systemic, efficiency and sustainability perspective.

 

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