Team Members:

SENSEable City Laboratory, MIT | Carlo Ratti: Director, Assaf Biderman: Associate Director, Rex Britter: Advisor, Stephen Miles: Advisor, Kristian Kloeckl Project Leader, Musstanser Tinauli, E Roon Kang, Alan Anderson, Avid Boustani, Natalia Duque Ciceri, Lorenzo Davolli, Samantha Earl, Lewis Girod, Sarabjit Kaur, Armin Linke, Eugenio Morello, Sarah Neilson, Giovanni de Niederhausern, Jill Passano, Renato Rinaldi, Francisca Rojas, Louis Sirota, Malima Wolf

Project Partner:

Waste Management, Inc.

Trash awaiting removal.

Nobody wonders where, each day, they carry their load of refuse. Outside the city, surely: but each year the city expands, and the street cleaners have to fall farther back. The bulk of the outflow increases and the piles rise higher, become stratified, extend over a wider perimeter. Italo Calvino, Invisible Cities

Imagine a future where immense amounts of trash didn’t pile up on the peripheries of our cities: a future where we understand the ‘removal-chain’ as we do the ‘supply-chain’, and where we can use this knowledge to not only build more efficient and sustainable infrastructures but to promote behavioral change. In this future city, the invisible infrastructures of trash removal will become visible and the final journey of our trash will no longer be “out of sight, out of mind”.

Elaborated by the SENSEable City Lab and inspired by the NYC Green Initiative, TrashTrack focuses on how pervasive technologies can expose the challenges of waste management and sustainability. Can these same pervasive technologies make 100% recycling a reality?

TrashTrack uses hundreds of small, smart, location aware tags: a first step towards the deployment of smart-dust – networks of tiny locatable and addressable microeletromechanical systems. These tags are attached to different types of trash so that these items can be followed through the city’s waste management system, revealing the final journey of our everyday objects in a series of real time visualizations.

The project is an initial investigation into understanding the ‘removal-chain’ in urban areas and represents a type of change that is taking place in cities: a bottom-up approach to managing resources and promoting behavioral change through pervasive technologies. TrashTrack builds on previous work of the SENSEable City Lab in its exploration of how the increasing deployment of sensors and mobile technologies radically transforms how we understand and describe cities.

Custom designed radio transmitting tag used for real time locationing of trash objects for the TrashTrack project.

Tagged coffee cup deployed in a Seattle trash bin.

Visualization of the route taken by a tagged coffee cup over a period of 7 days in Seattle. The white line indicates the route, the white circles indicate time spent stationary at specific locations, the bigger the circle the longer the tagged object remained stationary.

Diagram indicating how TrashTrack works. Wireless tags are attached to objects that are then discarded. As the objects move through the waste removal chain, the tag transmits its location to servers at MIT through short message communication. There, the data is processed to drive visualization software so as to represent the trash movements online and also by way of projected images in the exhibition.

For more information, visit senseable.mit.edu/trashtrack

Toward the Sentient City: Trash Track from Urban Omnibus on Vimeo.

Bios:

An architect and engineer, Prof. Carlo Ratti practices architecture in Turin and teaches at MIT, where he directs the SENSEable City Laboratory, a new research initiative within the Department of Urban Studies and Planning. Carlo’s work has been exhibited in leading museums worldwide, including the Kunsthaus Graz (2005), Venice Biennale (2004, 2006 and 2008), MoMA (2008), and Design Museum Barcelona (2009). Carlo has co-authored over 100 scientific publications and holds several patents. His Digital Water Pavilion at the World Expo 2008 was hailed by TIME Magazine as one of the ‘Best Inventions of the Year’; in December 2008 he was included in Esquire Magazine’s ‘Best & Brightest’ list.  Carlo graduated with an MSc in civil structural engineering from both the Politecnico di Torino, Italy and the Ecole Nationale des Ponts et Chaussées in Paris, France. He later received an MPhil and a PhD in Architecture from the University of Cambridge, UK.

Assaf Biderman, Co-Leader Trash Track Project, Associate Director SENSEable City Lab, MIT, is teaching at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he is the Associate Director of the SENSEable City Laboratory. Biderman has background in physics and human-computer interaction. He focuses on working in partnership with city administrations and industry members worldwide to explore how miniaturized and distributed technologies can be used to create more sustainable future of living in cities.

Rex Britter is the Emeritus Professor of Environmental Fluid Dynamics in the Department of Engineering at the University of Cambridge, UK and a Visiting Scientist at the SENSEable City Laboratory, Department of Urban Studies and Planning, MIT, Boston US. His research interests include fundamental studies into turbulent fluid dynamics, particularly those involving buoyancy. This is paralleled with operational interests in the flow and dispersion of hazardous materials, conventional pollutant dispersion problems in complex geometries such as cities, formalised model evaluation procedures, urban air quality, sustainable energy use in cities and security issues. He has published 5 books and some 300 articles in journals and conference proceedings.

Kristian Kloeckl works as industrial designer in Venice after having collaborated with Antonio Citterio in Milan and his projects have been exhibited at the MoMA Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Venice Biennale as well as the MAK museum in Vienna. He is a research affiliate at the MIT in Boston, teaches design and directs the NanoDesign research initiative at the Iuav University of Venice’ Design Faculty. Having conducted his studies in Austria and England, he graduated in Industrial Design at the Politecnico di Milano and holds a PhD in Design Sciences. In his work, Kristian focuses on translating the potential of emerging technologies and the opportunities of changing social contexts into artifacts accessible and experienceable to the user.

Musstanser Tinauli is a PhD candidate in Industrial Design and Multimedia Communication at the Politecnico di Milano, Italy. He has been awarded an IBM PhD and Rocca fellowship as a recognition of his research efforts. He also works as an Interaction Designer and IT Consultant at Centro METID in Milan. He has been a research affiliate with University of Sydney, Australia, and the Multimedia University, Cyberjaya, Malaysia, where he completed his graduate degree while serving as a Lecturer in the Faculty of Creative Multimedia. He holds a Masters by Research degree from Multimedia University, Malaysia, MSc./BS in Computer Sciences from Mohammad Ali Jinnah University, Islamabad, Pakistan, and has taught at Punjab College of Information and Technology, Pakistan. Musstanser has recently published seven international publications. Musstanser is one of the key members of the Trash Track project at SENSEable City Lab, MIT. He lead the project from February 2009 – July 2009.

Lewis Girod is a Research Scientist at the MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. He has been working in the area of wireless and embedded networked sensing since 1998. He joined CSAIL in 2006 after completing his PhD at UCLA in the Center for Embedded Networked Sensing. He has numerous academic publications in wireless sensor networks and broad experience implementing vertical networked sensing applications in academia and industry. He also holds a BS in Mathematics and and MEng in EECS from MIT.

E Roon Kang is a designer living and working in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His work focuses on studying complex systems, especially the adverse effects of a pursuit of efficiency. Currently a research fellow at SENSEable City Laboratory of MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), he received his BFA in graphic design from School of Visual Arts and MFA in graphic design from Yale University.

Jennifer Dunnam joined MIT’s SENSEable City Lab in the Spring of 2009 and is currently working on the Copenhagen Wheel, Trash Track and AUDI projects. Jennifer holds a BFA in Graphic Design and a BA in Sculpture from the University of Texas at Austin. In addition to her work at the SENSEable City Lab, Jennifer is pursuing her Master’s degree in Architecture at MIT. Her research within the lab reflects an interest in digital environments and dynamic interfaces that facilitate real-time communication. Before coming to MIT, Jennifer worked as a fabricator and product designer for a variety of artists including a blacksmith, sculptor and ceramicist.

Avid Boustani is a graduate student in Mechanical Engineering and Sloan School of Management at MIT. He is a research scientist for MIT Energy Initiative. Avid has over 5-years of research experience, analyzing complex theoretical and computational issues in regards to addressing feasible solutions to energy and environmental crisis demands. As an end-of-life expert, Avid has been assessing the energy and environmental impact of Trash Track sensors in the context of environmentally benign manufacturing, environmental policy frameworks, and green removal chains. Prior to Trash Track, Avid headed the industry outreach marketing for the 2009 MIT Energy Conference. At Trash Track, Avid is leading the strategic planning for grand-scale Trash Track deployment of tags in Seattle, New York City, and London. Avid has successfully launched two Internet startup ventures, and is the 2009 MIT $100K Business Plan Competition Life-Science track winner.

Funders/In-kind Contributors:

City of Seattle: Mayor’s office of Arts and Cultural Affairs, Seattle Public Utilities, The Seattle Public Library