CoSEP
COLLECTIVE for SOCIO-SPATIAL
& ENVIRONMENTAL PRAXIS
UC DAVIS
RESEARCH TRACKS AND THEMES
ABOUT
Established in Dec 2023, CoSEP undertakes transdisciplinary,
research-driven projects to address the socio-spatial and political nature of designing and governing the built environment to facilitate the fullness of life. CoSEP's projects lie at the intersection of design, technology, governance, and social justice. We are committed to praxis, or the reflective manner of combining theory and practice to achieve and sustain just futures. CoSEP is housed at the University of California, Davis, on the land of the home of the Patwin people.
© Akshita Sivakumar 2023 - 2024
RESEARCH TRACK: Technoscience of Environmental Governance
THEME #2: Technologies of Accountability and Solidarity
i.
Canary in the Coal Mine: Design for Environmental Governance
Canary in the Coal Mine: Design for Environmental Governance presents and responds to a provocation: Can Design have a useful role in mediating environmental governance and environmental justice?
Governance refers to the processes and institutions through which decisions about environmental policies and regulations are made and implemented. Environmental Justice is the social movement interested in clean and healthy environments in marginalized communities.
Design tools and technologies such as sensors and monitors are often used to collect evidentiary data about air pollution. Not long ago, canaries, the birds, were used to provide early warnings for carbon monoxide in coal mines due to their heightened sensitivity. Electronic laser particle sensors have since replaced the birds to measure and collect data about pollutants in real-time. What hasn’t changed, however, is the impetus to collect data about early warnings. Merely collecting data about the toxic gases in the air is rarely effective for environmental justice.
Design can and should do more than collect data. Canary in the Coalmine (CC) is a device that not only senses particulate matter PM2.5 and PM10, some of the most harmful pollutants, but also mobilizes action. It documents other forms of embodied knowledge through recordings of in-situ observations of community members which maintain momentum in the environmental justice movement. Visitors can interact with the canaries, observe how they sense pollutants, and listen to recordings of past sensing exercises.
This project emerges from four years of ethnographic work in California on issues of air pollution mitigation and decarbonization. It is steeped in the values of equity of knowledge, beautiful design for social good, and environmental justice. It turns sensing pollutants into a multisensorial experience and critical exercise.