Dietmar Offenhuber

Tracking Trash

Using active self-reporting tags, the authors followed 2,000 objects through Seattles waste management system. By making the waste "removal chain" more transparent, they help reveal the disposal process of everyday objects, highlighting potential inefficiencies in the current removal system.

Putting Matter in Place: Measuring Tradeoffs in Waste Disposal and Recycling

Problem, research strategy, and findings: Reliable information on trash disposal is crucial but becomes difficult as waste removal chains grow increasingly complex. Lack of firm data on the spatial behavior of waste hampers effective recycling strategy design. In particular, the environmental impact of electronic and household hazardous waste is poorly understood. Our study investigates waste processing in an environmental, economic, and geographic context, using novel methods to track municipal solid waste in the city of Seattle (WA). We observed the movement of 2,000 discarded items using attached active GPS sensors, recording an unprecedented spatial dataset of waste trajectories. We both qualitatively identified facilities visited along each items trajectory, then statistical modeled characteristic transportation distance and the likelihood of ending up at a specific type of facility by product categories, place of disposal, and collection mechanism. We show that a) electronic and household hazardous waste items travel significantly longer and have more arbitrary trajectories than other types of waste and b) that existing models for waste emissions may underestimate the environmental impact of transportation by not accounting for very long trajectories. Takeaway for practice: Transportation costs and emissions may diminish the value of recycling. Collection strategies deserve closer attention given the long distances over which they operate. Electronic tracking could provide data for evaluating waste management systems. Research support: Waste Management, Qualcomm, Sprint, and the New York Architectural League provided material support for this study.

Putting the informal on the map: tools for participatory waste management

Informal urban infrastructures are a challenging environment for participatory design, both from an organizational and technical perspective. In this paper we reflect on a recent research project involving participatory sensing and design of participatory technologies for informal recycling cooperatives. We collaborated with COOPAMARE, a cooperative in central São Paulo, Brazil, on two goals: to map their spatial organization of waste collection, and to develop software tools for coordinating with clients and planning operations. We discuss how GPS tracking, web-based mapping, and mobile applications allow cooperatives to collect, manage, and interpret spatial data themselves, and to redesign their own system collaboratively with others. We argue for applying participatory design in international development projects, which often neglect design aspects, and discuss the social, economic and technical contexts that impact design.

Monitour: Tracking global routes of electronic waste

Many nations seek to control or prevent the inflow of waste electronic and electrical equipment, but such flows are difficult to track due to undocumented, often illegal global trade in e-waste. We apply wireless GPS location trackers to this problem, detecting potential cases of non-compliant recycling operations in the United States as well as the global trajectories of exported e-waste. By planting hidden trackers inside discarded computer monitors and printers, we tracked dozens of devices being sent overseas to various ports in Asia, flows likely unreported in official trade data. We discuss how location tracking enables new ways to monitor, regulate, and enforce rules on the international movement of hazardous electronic waste materials, and the limitations of such methods.

Trash track – active location sensing for evaluating e-waste transportation

Waste and recycling systems are complex and far-reaching, but its mechanisms are poorly understood by the public, in some cases government organizations and even the waste management sector itself. The lack of empirical data makes it challenging to assess the environmental impact of trash collection, removal and disposal. This is especially the case for the global movement of electronic wastes. Senseable City Lab’s Trash Track project tackles this scarcity of data by following the trajectories of individual objects. The project presents a methodology involving active location sensors that were placed on end-of-life products donated by volunteers in the Seattle, Washington area. These tags sent location messages chronicling their journey, some over the course of a month or more. In this paper, the authors focus on the analysis of traces acquired from 146 items of electronic waste, estimating evaluating the environmental impact, including the travel distances and end-of-life treatments for the products. Combining this information with impact evaluation from the US Environmental Protection Agency’s Waste Reduction Model (WARM) allows for the creation of environmental impact profiles for individual pieces of trash.

TILTle: exploring dynamic balance

In this paper we introduce a novel interface for exploring dynamic equilibria using the metaphor of a traditional balance scale. Rather than comparing and identifying physical weight, our scale can be used for contrasting digital data in different domains. We do this by assigning virtual weight to objects, which physically affects the scale. Our goal is to make complex comparison mechanisms more visible and graspable.

Patterns of Choice: The Prix Ars Electronica Jury Sessions

ABSTRACT This article investigates the social structures reflected in the annual jury sessions of the Prix Ars Electronica, a major media art competition—the composition, the temporal evolution and ultimately the decisions of these juries. The author focuses on three different structures: the network of co-jurors across different categories and years, the co-artist network formed by the jury decisions, and finally the interaction between these two networks. The results not only reveal different roles of individuals in the jury process but also reflect the evolution of the field in general. Based solely on public data, the results show a multifaceted picture of a dynamic field.

moviemaps revisited

Moviemaps are spatialised movies, allowing the user to interactively travel through the film-space of a prerecorded sequence. The topic was introduced by M. Naimark and has been addressed in many interactive artworks. This sketch presents a different approach and new possibilities for the creation of moviemaps.