Last workshop for the URair project
Katerina Bakousi
Oct. 16, 2020, 3:08 p.m.
URair is the subproject of URwatair focusing on air pollution. Air includes lots of harmful substances (pollutants) influencing our health and degrading our quality of life. The URair project focused on the particulate matter as well as on its fine fraction (PM10 and PM2.5 respectively). Combining citizen science and the use of air quality micro-sensors, URair enabled citizens to monitor the quality of breathed air in their daily environment. The project aimed at transforming the citizen from a passive recipient of environmental information to a participant in the monitoring of the environment and her/his quality of life.
For this reason, the citizens followed the scientific team scenarios, carried out measurements and recorded their everyday actions to the event-driven diaries, and participated in the workshops. These included two outdoor scenarios (Transportation and My Neighborhood scenarios), two indoor scenarios, (Cooking and Living Room scenarios), and a both outdoor and indoor monitoring scenario, the Living Lab scenario. Moreover, there were three devices used to perform the measurements: Air Visual, Dylos Logger, and Sensebox.
The last workshop of the project was held on the 16th of September.
In the first section of the workshop, there was a presentation aiming at reminding the citizens participants about the structure of the project, its scenarios, and event-driven diaries, and the results given from previous workshops and measurements.
The second section of the workshop was focused on the participants’ aspects and suggestions of the URair project.
First of all, they were asked to fill in an online questionnaire via Google Docs about the air pollution sources, depending on their experience of the project based on the scenario they have followed.
This action followed a brainstorming about the best practices that citizens compiled with the aim to reduce the levels of air pollution they are exposed to in their everyday life.
This section ended with the evaluation of the URair project on 5 pillars: what they would like and would not like to change about the project, which part of the project was the most challenging and which one was the most difficult for them, which are their suggestions for future actions.
The final section of the workshop was devoted to an open discussion between the scientific team and the participants. The discussion involved two main topics: the best practices suggestions and project evaluation.
As the latter part of the discussion concerned citizens’ suggestions for future actions, we shared with them the teaser trailer of the EU-Citizen.Science platform, as a tool to be used to start a new project or to enrich an old one.
