Getting Started: An Incomplete List of Sensor Kits

Let’s look more closely at a few citizen-sensing technologies to consider how these practices present alternative strategies for documenting and acting on environmental problems. While only a few of the many sensors available for environmental monitoring are addressed in this how-to investigation, there is an extensive array of citizen-sensing projects that have been variously reviewed, assessed, tested, and assembled throughout this research.

The focus here is on monitoring air quality. Yet there are many more sensors for monitoring water, noise, vibration, temperature, humidity, wind, heat, energy, radiation, soil, and vegetation. Water quality can be monitored through conductivity, temperature, and total dissolved solid sensors like the CaTTfish, and water levels can be monitored through ultrasonic sensors like the Flood Monitor.22 There are Pocket Geiger sensors for measuring radiation,23 and DIY seismic sensors for measuring earthquake activity.24 Moisture sensors monitor the health and presence of vegetation,25 and temperature and humidity sensors monitor beehives and ensure the health of honeybees.26 One of the earliest and longest-standing uses of DIY sensors has been monitoring air quality. Numerous sensors are now in circulation for monitoring air, from the DIY to those sold as finished products.27 A partial list of operational, obsolete, and speculative citizen-sensing devices and toolkits for monitoring air quality includes the following:

• Aclima
• Airbeam
• Airbox
• AirCasting
• AirKit
• Air Quality Egg
• AirSensa
• Air Sensor Toolbox
• AirVeda
• AirVisual
• Alphasense Sensors
• Area Immediate Reading (AIR)
• Array of Things
• Atmotube
• Awair
• Breathe Cam
• Brizi
• Cair Smart Air Quality Sensor
• Citizen Sense Toolkit
• CityAir App
• Clarity
• Clean Space Tag
• Common Sense
• DR1000 Flying Laboratory
• Dustbox
• DustDuino
• Dylos
• EarthSense Zephyr
• Float_Beijin
• Flow, Plume Labs
• Foobot
• Grove Air Quality Sensor
• hackAir
• IGERESS
• InfluencAir
• IQAir
• iSPEX
• LaserEgg 2
• LifeBasis
• LondonAir App
• Luftdaten
• MicroPEM
• Netatmo
• NOKLEAD
• PANDA
• Plantower
• Plume Air Report
• PuffTrones
• PurpleAir
• PUWP (Portable University of Washington Particle monitor)
• Safecast
• SensorBox
• Sensors in the Sky
• Shinyei Particle Sensor
• Sidepak Personal Aerosol Monitor
• Smart Citizen Kit
• Smoke Sense App
• Soofa Benches
• Speck
• Tree Wi-Fi
• Tzoa (Enviro-tracker)
• WeatherCube
• Wynd

These are DIY sensors and off-the-shelf kits, wearables and desktop devices, as well as a few apps that double as sensors through the use of smartphones for monitoring or navigating environments. The sensor names variously suggest democratic initiatives, technical enterprises, environmental revitalization, research projects, and manga characters. The list of names further designates projects and products, communities and practices, locations and platforms. In other words, these toolkits do not de facto include certain components and exclude others. They are in varying states of composition and decomposition, salability and availability, with different monitoring capacities.

Some of the companies or makers of the sensors mentioned above make avowedly apolitical statements, which indicate that the data the sensors collect are not intended to support political projects, nor are the data open to the collectors of air-pollution data.28 Other projects, such as the Dustbox developed through the Citizen Sense research group, deliberately seek to investigate how or whether new types of political and environmental engagement can materialize with these sensors.29 Many of these projects focus on the technical device that is meant to organize, attract, and mobilize citizen participation and data collection. The problem of air quality is in part organized through the devices and practices that environmental sensors make possible. Monitoring air pollutants, collecting data, and communicating evidence about elevated pollutant levels could be seen to be instrumental approaches to air quality, which these instruments facilitate. The instruments and instrumentality of air quality unfold in relation to this broader proliferation of sensors and sensor citizenship. Yet these are open-air instrumentalisms that do not follow a unilateral trajectory.

In this incomplete list of citizen-sensing projects and technologies, you might notice that some devices are ready-made and others require assembly. A number of devices are “locked down” as consumer products while others require ongoing tinkering and maintenance. Several of the sensors included in the preceding list are beta-stage and prototype technologies that have particular idiosyncrasies and require adjusted setup, troubleshooting, and puzzling over how to work with the data they collect and present. Throughout this research, sensors available in makerly form have increasingly crept toward a more settled, product-like state, and in the context of the IoT, several plug-and-play sensors are now available. Yet, if you have worked through building and setting up air-quality sensors, you are inevitably left to wonder about how or whether such off-the-shelf devices are calibrated, how to access and analyze data, and whether data can be used to support claims about environmental pollution.

This overview of air-quality devices and practices is also incomplete because sensors, and especially air-quality sensors, continue to multiply and expire within the usual fleeting time spans of electronic devices. As soon as sensor technologies and projects are identified, new devices emerge and others lapse into obsolescence. Some of the air-quality sensors in this list are new, some are prototypes no longer in use, and some are dead devices that would require considerable effort to reboot and plug back in to operable systems. As with many tech projects, once devices sediment into stable forms, they as readily disappear or cease functioning, with websites flickering into oblivion, firmware updates colliding with hardware configurations, and peripherals no longer communicating across ports.30 But this observation also jumps ahead, because it points to a few things to keep in mind when starting to use citizen-sensing toolkits. First, it is worthwhile to discuss briefly how sensor kits are configured as cosmologies of sorts.

Flat-Pack Cosmologies

The modular instructions and diagrams for assembling toolkits demonstrate a distinct approach to problems, where relevant components are gathered together, documented, and assembled into an entity that will address the problem at hand. Think of the flat pack that consists of an itemized inventory of parts, including atomized images of assembly, with connecting actions signaled through arrows segueing across framed sequences toward a clear outcome. Similar to many modular products that can now be purchased and assembled with apparent ease, a certain flat-pack relationality is operationalized through sensor toolkits. All the items needed to complete the project need only be joined together by following instructions. What begins to unfold in this approach to toolkits and instructions, actions and outcomes are flat-pack cosmologies, where the speculative pluriverse of environmental problems assembles into neat diagrams of constructable relations held together through air-quality sensors.

Cosmology is a term used by Alfred North Whitehead to describe a metaphysical system that represents a universe of relations undergoing processes of transformation.31 The term also has a longer history of use within Indigenous theory and practice to refer to experiences, connections, and activities held in common.32 And Alexis Gumbs’s breath-based cosmology, discussed in the Introduction, suggests how to cultivate connections for realizing political possibility. While flat-pack cosmologies is inevitably a diverging use of the term and concept, it indicates how the toolkit as a distributed and connected system forms and works, including how entities develop, how relations join up, how societies materialize, and how these varying components unfold and are sustained because of the values attributed to technology, especially in modular form.33 If there is no one-world world, by extension there is no one-cosmology cosmology. Cosmological systems of relations form through experiencing subjects, whether sensors or humans, which also have political effects.34

These cosmologies provide reference points for engaging with the relations that toolkits call into being. Toolkits offer a particular way of concretizing maker-subjects, items for construction, modes of assembly, models of action, modes of becoming, desired outcomes, and strategies for holding things together or throwing everything away. Toolkits are ways of organizing problems and relations for action. Even when the point is to crack open or even tear down the black box of sensor technology,35 the component parts indicate new modes of assembly. This tearing down and putting together, constituting and reconstituting of entities, is indeed a salient characteristic of toolkits, which are notable for their modularity and flat-pack-ness but need to be sufficiently open to be adaptable to new circumstances and uses.36

Toolkits, especially air-quality monitoring toolkits, are at once procedural and contingent arrangements. Indeed, the procedural method becomes quickly troubled in the flurry of calculating how to work with toolkits in the open air of environmental monitoring. The next section details these points of procedure as well as how they can go awry. Also of note with the how-to guide is that the you/your of the instructional refers to a maker who is brought into a technical relation. As I follow this instructional, I similarly traverse from first to second person to inhabit the you/your of the instructional and the imperative mood, and to work through the practice-based and participatory aspects of setting up DIY sensor technologies. Let’s begin.

Ten Points for How to Construct Toolkits

When starting off with a citizen-sensing project, one of the first things you might wonder about is how to construct a monitoring toolkit. Yet a toolkit is always more than just a collection of sensors and assorted digital gear. Some toolkits more extensively outline techniques for learning protocols, organizing collection efforts, analyzing data, and influencing policy than the finer details of technical kit configurations.37 Here are a few notes that outline some of the key considerations when beginning your project. Afterward we will look at a few sample projects that will give you a more detailed sense of how these points could be implemented.

Making in the Imperative Mood

There are numerous guides for working with sensors, including such texts as Getting Started with Sensors and Environmental Monitoring with Arduino, among other online manuals and tutorials. These texts could seem to be a good place to start, since they set out instructions to follow, sensors to make, and ways of toggling across making and essential concepts. The process of following one of these texts, however, yields unexpected processes of making, inquiry, and engagement. If you begin your voyage with sensors in this way, you will notice certain abiding themes for assembling technologies.

See, connect, attach. Insert, double-click. Orient, insert, connect, push, fold, twist, insert. Grammarians would parse this as the imperative mood. Action verbs and commands distinctly characterize the how-to of DIY electronics. Words order action. Language exhorts. Do this and complete that. Command equals outcome. Make yourself into a model citizen, and a citizen able to make models. Along the way, there will be helpful tips and conversational sidebars to review key milestones and to assure you that the makerly relationship is more friendly than authoritarian as you progress toward your goal.

The how-to guide, then, is a genre of sorts, not only in the stylistic sense but also as a way of organizing anticipation. As Lauren Berlant has noted, “genres provide an affective expectation of watching something unfold, whether that thing is in life or in art.”44 What is expected in the how-to guide, and how is it meant to unfold? One could say it is a genre of problem solving. Problems are identified that can be addressed through learning and sharing skills and procedures. Yet the act of constituting problems is also a way of constituting worlds.45 To make sensors, write code, and collect data are to undertake practices of environmental monitoring that commit to a specific way of acting on pollution. The how-to guide is meant to make acquiring and executing these practices more doable. It also creates practices that attach citizen makers and citizen sensors to distinct ways of engaging with worlds.

In the primers to citizen sensing, instructions are found in the form of how-to guides for making kits from assorted electronic peripherals. They also assemble as step-by-step directions for setting up and plugging in an off-the-shelf sensor to an online platform to view data. There are instructions for following monitoring protocols, instructions for calibration, and instructions for installing sensors in polluted locations. In the O’Reilly text Getting Started with Sensors, which I detail here as the first example of attempting to work with sensors, hypothetical maker–readers begin the project of assembling sensors while also “bending technology to [their] will” to control computation and environments.46 Here the instructional promises a curious mastery of technology, which, as one quickly discovers, can be a bit misleading.

According to this basic guide, the process of getting started with sensors first involves asking “What are sensors?” The text readily provides the answer that a sensor is an electrical input device that “evaluate[s] a particular stimulus within the environment.”47 It would seem that any change or disturbance in an environment could be detected and transmitted into digital form. Sounding in a Simondonian register, the authors describe this as a process of “Transduction!” to explain how sensors control circuits and, by extension, environments.48 Here, environmental phenomena are undergoing conversions into electrical and digital outputs. The “how” prevails over the “why”—technology performs its own logic of execution.

Yet, when following instructions in a guide and toolkit such as this one, you will find that time for reflection is often cut short, since the point is to get on and make things. After asking the maker-to-be to reflect on what sensors are or might be, the authors of this instructional abruptly rejoin, “Enough discussion—it’s time to build!”49 And so you will be off, testing batteries and breadboards and LEDs, switches and alarms. There are many sensors to build here, including infrared proximity sensors, rotation sensors, photoresistors, pressure sensors, temperature sensors, and ultrasonic sensors. It will take some time to get to the finer points of connecting up air-quality sensors, which are not even covered in this basic text. However, as you work through the configurations of these many sensors, you will find that it is one thing to generate a reading from a temperature sensor and quite another to know whether the sensor is providing a verifiable measurement. In the course of setting up temperature sensors in our work space on the tenth floor of an aging office building without air-conditioning, for instance, we found that according to our temperature sensors, indoor summer temperatures instantly leaped to 40 degrees Celsius. Was this due to the electrical wiring of our sensor circuit, was it due to the placement of our sensor near a window on the sunny side of the building, or were we really just about to perish from heat exhaustion? Sensors at this stage of assembly can give rise to extensive questions about the state of the surrounding environment.

The temperature sensor test that Getting Started with Sensors provides is to move the sensor in and out of the refrigerator, placing it in room temperature and then cooling it down in an appliance. But if you also want to speed up the process, you can expose the sensor to ice cubes, the text suggests. The introduction of a stimulus is often used to see whether a sensor is reading. An air-pollution sensor can be exposed to a lit match, cigarette, or vacuum cleaner to see a spike or dip in the data. The first stage of connecting a sensor, then, often involves working through these processes of setting up the sensor circuit configuration, loading a bit of copy-and-paste code to a microcontroller, and then testing whether the sensor detects the introduction of basic stimuli by generating detectable changes in the data.

Many of the kits that allow you to get started in testing sensors in this way are now available as maker kits with all the necessary parts to develop a basic plant-watering system, gas sensor, or temperature sensor. Companies such as Seeed Studio sell an array of such kits that fit within the language of other assembly-based hobbies. Parts to be assembled are included along with instructions, and the process of making is meant to generate new understandings of technology through doing. DIY practices on one level are meant to “challenge traditional hierarchies of authority and the existing status quo,” as Matthew Ratto and Megan Boler suggest, by decentering the usual sites and practices of making.50 Yet DIY can also reinforce particular ways of engaging with technology, for instance, as a project of following instructions to bend technology to one’s will, or in other words, to gain technical mastery and to work on a universal if abstract problem. Mastery as a project has come under fire not just from philosophers of technology such as Simondon but also from postcolonial and decolonial thinkers like Julietta Singh, who suggests that a project of “unthinking mastery” can be a way to undo the estrangement that comes with these forms of relation.51

DIY practices tend to be at once open-ended and instructional. What I am calling the imperative mood in this context is inevitably related to that better-known theory of the “performative mood” developed by J. L. Austin in his study How to Do Things with Words.52 The performative mood is a way of mobilizing actions, relations, and worlds through speech acts. Austin was interested in studying ways of doing things with words by considering the infelicities, misfires, and miscalculations that occur within the performative mood.53 His theory has in turn influenced thinkers like Judith Butler, who has further investigated how social constructs like gender are performed and materialized.54 Karen Barad draws on and reworks Butler’s discussion of performativity by adding a material and posthuman dimension that shifts discursive statements to a field of multi-agential possibilities (rather than an exclusively human utterance or action). In this way, performativity is less about language in abstraction and more about what Barad calls the “conditions of mattering.”55

Theorists of digital technologies and digital citizenship have built on these concepts of performativity to analyze how digital practices can constitute ways of performing digital citizenship.56 Citizenship in these renderings is always a practice on the move, where political subjects and possibilities form and transform through lived engagements. While there is much more to say about performativity than space here allows, this proposal for an imperative mood attempts to work with and alongside this constructivist approach to words, actions, and materialities to investigate how such a mood might generate its own distinct configuration of instructions, relations, practices, technics, and milieus. Even more than drawing out the generative aspects that characterize theories of performativity, I would suggest that the misfires and miscalculations come to the fore just as readily (if differently) when engaging in the imperative mood. These misfires could also be a particular entry point into understanding how open-air instrumentalisms take hold, as swerving experiments with instruments. A resistor inserted into the same pin of a breadboard as an LED or sensor can easily end up back to front. A sensor-wire-battery configuration might connect up or become disconnected. A sensor output might be all but inexplicable. Hence every list of imperative commands comes with its inevitable section on “Troubleshooting” to help makers figure out what has gone wrong along the way. But this process plays out in much more elaborate ways than simply faulty wiring or misaligned sensors. It can also extend to dodgy code and incorrect conversions, as well as data platform errors and bungled sensor housing. Misfires and miscalculations can and often do extend to botched sensor installations, inscrutable data output, and indifferent responses to data gathered.

Many theorists have discussed how instruments generate more-than-descriptive engagements that enact worlds. In other words, instruments are world-making. They are constructive and performative of the worlds that they would detect, measure, and act upon.57 But the imperative mood designates explicit actions along with observations that might be achieved. It constitutes the methods by which such constructions and performativity occur or falter. The imperative mood constitutes the conditions, subjects, and environments in and through which a project is meant to happen and an outcome achieved. It tends to be normative in its register of address. For example, when you load code onto a microcontroller, there is little sense that there are multiple ways of completing this task. Instead, you pursue the project in the seemingly correct way, which you are meant to master before moving to the next step. This configuration of technology, maker–citizen–subject, technical relations, and practical action is what the imperative mood designates.

This initial example of working with sensors by following a standard maker text such as an O’Reilly guidebook demonstrates a common entry point and process whereby sensor instruction occurs. Sensor ontologies quickly give way to flat-pack cosmologies, where component parts join up to create electrical arrangements of action and reaction. The progression through a guidebook and the formation of your own toolkit can be delineated as the working through of devices: from LEDs to temperature and pressure sensors. In other words, guidebooks can promise makers a form of technical mastery without considering the open air where sensors would circulate and shape-shift through attempts to monitor and act on pollution in order to build more breathable worlds. When making citizen-sensing toolkits and following instructions for assembling sensors, it is important to consider how these instructions organize a particular way of encountering environmental pollution through digital sensing, which in turn establishes technological relations and possibilities.

Simply Connect

Once you’ve attempted to assemble sensors from their basic component parts, you might next decide to test an off-the-shelf sensor that does not require an intricate process of assembly with breadboards and jumper cables. As noted, an increasing array of sensor objects and off-the-shelf products can be procured through Kickstarter pledges and online shopping. The Air Quality Egg, which I detail here as the second example of attempting to work with sensors, is perhaps one of the most iconic of these citizen-sensing devices. Having been prototyped through a series of hacker events from 2010 to 2012 (which I describe in Program Earth),58 the Egg moved from prototype to salable product by 2013, when the Citizen Sense research project was underway. Because the Egg was an air-pollution sensor that could be purchased as a complete product, it did not require soldering or microcontroller setup. Such an off-the-shelf sensor would seem to allow for more attention to be given to environmental monitoring, data collection, and public engagement. So our research group began to investigate the capacities of this device.

We placed an order for our own Egg in the middle of July 2013. In late July, the sensor arrived at our offices in London, sent from Wicked Device, based in Ithaca, New York. On its outer label, the neatly packaged device promised to make more engaged citizens of us all. It declared:

Problem Solved. Do you ever think about the air you breathe? It affects us in ways we can see and also in ways we can’t. The Air Quality Egg is a project working to make the air we breathe more “visible.” Simply hang it in your home, office or outside your window to start collecting your personal air quality data. The Air Quality Egg connects you with a global community of concerned citizens participating in the ongoing air quality conversation.

The strangely daunting prospect of simply plugging in and connecting to a global community of concerned citizens able to solve an environmental problem as intractable as air pollution meant the Egg actually sat on our shelf for another week. Opening the kit seemed to be a ceremonial event for which we needed to be prepared.

So when, in early August, we set aside time to unbox and install the Egg, we made a wager as to how much time would pass before we were successfully gathering air-quality sensor data. Estimates spanned from having the device up and running within the afternoon to a few days. A more skeptical researcher estimated that it could take months, if ever, until sensor data were coursing through this plastic Egg and transforming into environmental solutions. You might find yourself engaged in such speculation as to what the final setup and output from your off-the-shelf sensors could be. This process is central to how citizen-sensing practices take form as ongoing contingencies of devices, environments, and engagement.

Once we had unpackaged the Air Quality Egg and scanned the different components of the kit, we next read through the seemingly straightforward how-to instructions. We began the setup by entering the device’s serial number (or MAC address) into the Air Quality Egg Google Maps platform, where we also located and named our Egg.59 With this, we were able to see the Citizen Sense Egg in South East London, situated within a wider global community of sensing citizens, albeit one that at the time numbered around 250 in population worldwide. Here was an apparently eager if niche community of Egg owners, ready to solve the problem of global air pollution. Once our Egg was on the map, we turned to setting up the device and posting data. You might find, as we did, that putting your sensor on a map is often the most basic and straightforward of the technical challenges you will encounter with the Egg.

The Air Quality Egg is formed of a pair of translucent white plastic Eggs: a “base” station Egg that at the time of testing posted data to the Xively platform, and a “remote” Nanode Egg that does the job of sensing air pollutants and gathering data via a shield outfitted with metal oxide sensors that detect nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide, along with temperature and humidity sensors attached to an Arduino microcontroller. Although there have been updates and a new version of the Egg since the time of this testing, with data now posted to a different platform and updates made in sensor setup, this was the device arrangement with which we worked at the time. As referred to in points 5 and 7 above, you’ll find that the Air Quality Egg presents numerous dilemmas in the form of upgrades and fixes. These events are not unique to the Egg, because not only are these relatively new and unstable devices but also they inevitably succumb to the rapid rates of obsolescence that are characteristic of electronics.

During Egg setup, we next discovered that the power plug was configured for US electrics. Since we did not have a power converter, we had to set the proj-ect aside until we sourced an adapter for the UK context. This was a simple enough problem, but we found that it was just the beginning of several stages at which we realized additional kit would be needed to make the Egg function. Once we’d eventually powered the device, we found it did not perform the correct color sequence to indicate that it was collecting and posting data. Flashing color sequences were how we were to “gain awareness” of air pollution through the successful posting of environmental data to the platform. But the sequence of our flashing colors did not follow the same sequence outlined in the setup instructions. We spent some time trying to determine exactly what the color conversions were indicating, before discovering that the color issues were due to a bug that had been discovered several months earlier, in January 2013, but was still affecting devices shipped as late as ours, where the Eggs were no longer talking to the Xively platform for displaying data. An elaborate process then ensued of attempting to reprogram the Egg base and remote Nanode, following the official Air Quality Egg Google forum and FAQ instructions, which linked us to a seemingly straightforward video indicating how to fork a repository of code from GitHub to reprogram the Arduino microcontroller in the Air Quality Egg.

And yet, after completing the process of reprogramming, the Eggs were still not producing “data,” neither in the form of flashing color nor in the form of line graphs on Xively or cryptic bar charts on the Google Maps Air Quality Egg page. Eventually, through multiple waves of turning the device on and off and reloading and verifying code, we managed to obtain blips of data, strange right angles in line graphs, and numbers apparently in parts per billion of nitrogen dioxide or carbon monoxide, but generally remaining inexplicable in terms of what measurement they presented, exactly. We had a modest assurance that the temperature and humidity readings might be somewhat correct, because these agreed with other sensors we had in operation in the same space, but converting the nitrogen dioxide and carbon monoxide measurements to a legible figure was a rather more difficult matter, since we did not have other verifiable sensors in operation for comparison. Our closest point of reference was with the official London Air Quality Network station, and here the measurements were not in units that could be easily cross-referenced.

By getting the Egg up and running, we had experienced what one of our developer–collaborators called the “‘Hello World’ of IoT.” Getting an air-pollution sensor to post data was a basic achievement along the pathway of the IoT. Yet in the process of connecting the Egg we were more intent on asking this IoT “world” a host of other questions about how these devices were sensing air pollutants. What were these sensors sensing, exactly? How could we find out more about the hardware and software setup and the extent to which this could influence the data outputs? Precisely how did the “color-equals-awareness” engagement with environmental data work, especially when color did not signal pollution levels?60 At the same time, what sorts of data were these, in terms of their accuracy, legibility, and legitimacy, when even getting a device to work, whatever the readings, seemed to be an achievement? And now that our device was operational, what were the capacities of the network of concerned citizens to which we were connected? From our use of the Air Quality Egg forums, it seemed that the communities to which we connected had more interest in hobby electronics and computer tinkering than mobilizing their data to influence air-quality policy or enforcement.61 Indeed, the Egg was now circulating in the world in ways where maker communities effectively contributed free R&D by testing the device, while finding fixes and improvements through necessary troubleshooting.62

The universal citizen sensor, embedded in a community of global citizens, comes down to earth by working with the specificities of particular infrastructural configurations. The seamless plug-and-play logic and practices that such devices would promise continually meet with simple obstacles and more complex malfunctions. The imperative mood here might instruct you to plug in your Air Quality Egg and connect to other global and instrumental citizens. But your inability to complete the command or follow the instructions can multiply into a whole set of other practices, infrastructures, and relations that you will likely need to call on to fulfill seemingly straightforward instructions. Similarly, Lucy Suchman has pointed out that even a task as obvious as pushing a green button on a photocopier machine can give rise to confusion, adjustment practices, technical communities, and modified technological artifacts that materialize when simple button-pushing does not yield the expected results.63 Instructions seem to guide a technical encounter, but they do not determine it. Instead, the “sense” made of and through instructions materializes in the actual undertaking of a technical practice.64 Practice-based research in this way is an approach that surfaces the many adjustments and deviations that can arise when working with technologies in lived situations. Instruments and instrumentalities frequently deviate from simple action and outcome. These are the misfires of the imperative mood, which generate the open-air instrumentalisms of citizen-sensing technologies.

Off-the-shelf sensors may promise that you can “simply connect”—and by extension also connect to greater air-pollution awareness and a community of global and instrumental citizens—but they often do not unfold in such a straightforward or liberatory fashion. Instead, they generate open-air instrumentalisms that deviate from the process of following instructions and setting up toolkits. Air-quality sensors do not always immediately function, either technically or in terms of their broader sociopolitical and environmental effects, but in the malfunction of devices and the reconstitution of instructions, other worlds in the making are generated along with instrumental citizens. The misfires that percolate through the imperative mood occur in part through anomalous technical arrangements that come into being, as detailed here, and in part through how these devices circulate and are taken up to address environmental problems. While these sensors proved to be anything but off-the-shelf, there is the possibility (if not the danger) that the promise of such modular and ready-to-use devices also could begin to inhabit the space of politics, encounters, and relations, for instance, in the form of off-the-shelf politics, off-the-shelf citizenship, and off-the-shelf public engagement. This is why it is important to ask what sorts of instrumentalisms are mobilized with apparently ready-made sensing technologies and sensing practices.

At the time of this writing, the Air Quality Egg has undergone many updates and is now available for sale in newer versions.65 The website notes that “big improvements” have been made to the version 1 Egg that we tested. Indeed, its supplier, Wicked Device, no longer supports version 1, and Xively, the platform host, has terminated the data service that the version 1 Egg used. To post data, the Egg would need to be reconfigured to send to a different data platform. As the Wicked Device announcement states about this option, “That’s a fair amount of work, and will require that you recompile and re-load your Egg with the new service destination.”66 The easier route is to purchase the version 2 Air Quality Egg, which guarantees an even more seamless plug-and-play experience. A new device replaces the defunct one, and the promise of technical action becoming democratic action is refreshed.

Around the time we had undertaken our own provisional setup with the Egg, I began to be asked by representatives from local governments, environmental NGOs, and even air-quality officers in small nations whether they could replace their expensive monitoring instruments and networks with Eggs. My cautious reply was, not unless you’d like to spend considerable time dealing with misfires and miscalculations. While many of these off-the-shelf devices can be and are used in interesting ways that add to the scope of DIY practices, they are tetchy gadgets that produce a variable range of data that currently do not transfer well to the spaces of air-quality regulation. While a modest achievement can be made in getting a sensor device such as an Egg up and running, its flickering displays and data outputs do not necessarily sync well with the expanded technical, social, political, and environmental requirements of air-quality governance in its usual sense. For this, you might need to engage with even more versions of the how-to, including points 7 to 10 given earlier, which indicate how the technoscientific configuration of an air-quality sensor and the data it generates depend upon extended infrastructures to make sense.67 These are infrastructures not just of technical capability but also of stabilizing data-as-evidence to address the experience and event of air pollution.

Whereas the Air Quality Egg seems to promise that air-quality monitoring can become a relatively effortless affair, many plug-and-play sensors require considerable effort to become operational. Updated and upgraded versions will still require ongoing maintenance and fixes, as well as skilling up to learn about technical configurations. At the same time, air-quality sensors are now proliferating apace, with many more sensors becoming workable as plug-and-play devices. The PurpleAir sensor and IQAir, for instance, are now in regular use to monitor air pollution from wildfires, traffic, industry, and more. Yet every sensor still raises questions about the verifiability of the data these plug-and-play devices generate, as well as the protocols and practices used during installation. While in no way meant to deter you from testing out citizen-sensing technologies, this how-to setup that involves working across standard instructions as well as actual practices undertaken is meant to demonstrate the misfires and miscalculations that proliferate when inhabiting the imperative mood and when working with the genre of the how-to and the toolkit.

The Reluctant Prototype

Parallel to, and perhaps even in advance of, working with the Air Quality Egg, we were in the process of developing our own prototype air-quality-sensing toolkits, which I detail here as the third example of working with sensors in practice. To begin, we assembled provisional groupings of nitrogen dioxide and particulate-matter sensors that we had used in a pilot walk in the New Cross area of London in early July of that same year.68 You might find that as you progress from following O’Reilly and Instructable tutorials, your own devices assemble neither as makerly stuff nor as off-the-shelf kit, but as particular prototypes that are cobbled together in a cut-and-paste and makeshift way. A sensor configuration that works in one setup can be morphed over to another expanded kit, and code passes along on these various iterations or is drawn from libraries to create a new workable concoction.

In just this way, we were attempting to put together a possible prototype citizen-sensing kit that we could use while undertaking fieldwork in the United States, where we were researching fracking-related pollution in Pennsylvania.69 Multiple citizen-sensing activities to address pollution and public-health concerns were already underway in Pennsylvania. In this context, we wondered what role a prototype kit could play in engaging people to ask questions about environmental data, how the data are generated, and their effects in addressing the problem of air pollution. How might data be shared and collectivized? How might data travel differently from the current, if complex, modes of reporting on well locations and pollution levels? In the process of building a kit comprising multiple air-quality sensors, including nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, temperature, humidity, and particulate matter 2.5 (PM_2.5) sensors, we found that as many questions were raised about the validity of data that might be generated from such a kit as the possible promises and expectations that could be raised by circulating environmental technologies to communities affected by pollution from fracking. We were beginning to engage with sensors in the open air, not just by moving them to actual sites of pollution detection, but also by collaboratively testing them with communities knowledgeable about documenting pollution through environmental data collection and analysis. In this context, open-air instrumentalisms and instrumental citizens multiplied and abounded even further.

This toolkit in the making demanded that we think through the instructions and how-to pointers that we might provide to make the kit legible and usable. Numerous questions came up when we thought about how these kits might be used in the field: Would there be a manual with instructions for use? Would each sensor be explained in relation to what it senses and how chemical detection optimally works? How long would the sensors need to operate to collect usable data? How long should the sample rates and duration of monitoring be? Would the sensors work only if stationary, and should instructions be given to keep the kit stable during use? Would data be made available to individual participants, or would it be shared collectively on a web platform? Should data be given locational information or be made anonymous? What instructions might participants need to analyze the data in order for them to be meaningful and actionable? Would the sensor housing skew the readings in any way? What are the base readings of the sensors, and are we sure they are properly calibrated? Would the sensors or pollutants interfere with each other? Could we be certain they are sensing exactly what they are meant to sense? Finally, would the kit be damaged in shipping from London to Pennsylvania, and what adjustments might need to be made in the field?

These questions connected up with our attempts to ensure that multiple participants’ engagement with the kit might be collaborative and experimental from the beginning and not only a functional end application. At this point in the development of sensors, we queried the notion that by collecting data—accurate, skewed, or otherwise—environmental politics would be more readily democratized or facilitated. We sought to work through this seemingly more instrumental–functionalist agenda by following and querying the possible trajectories of data to action. Yet while we sought to critically examine the role of environmental monitoring technologies in forming practices and politics, rather than simply becoming advocates of this approach, we also had to take seriously the instrumental logics of these devices and the citizen-sensing practices they activated and organized. These reworkings of instrumentality became part of how we experimented with making alternative citizen-sensing toolkits that could engage with the practices and concerns of participants engaged in preexisting monitoring projects and generate usable data, while also opening into other engagements with environmental problems.

So, with all of this in mind, in fall 2013 we began making prototypes to test how sensors generate, influence, and operationalize environmental data. Our version 1 Citizen Sense Toolkit initially consisted of two primary devices: a sensor shield pulled from the Air Quality Egg, which included nitrogen dioxide, carbon monoxide, temperature, and humidity sensors that we attached to a Grove Board to add a real-time clock; and a Raspberry Pi microcontroller. The version 2 Citizen Sense Toolkit comprised stand-alone sensors (rather than a pluggable sensor shield), including carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, PM_2.5, temperature, and humidity sensors; we added our own resistance configurations, which we found considerably improved the readings in comparison to the Egg shield.

With both of the preliminary Citizen Sense Toolkits, the first intention was to get the devices up and running, because in the process of making the kit even more questions had emerged about the how of the how-to. The second intention was to disassemble and reverse-engineer more black-boxed technologies, such as the Egg, which on one level required all sorts of capacities and resources to function and on another level had rather unclear information about how the hardware and software were put together, how the sensors were configured, what resistance was used and how this affected data outputs, and how continual changes of the data platform “back end” (from Pachube to Cosm to Xively) could affect the data’s form and analysis. You might find yourself asking similar questions if you attempt (or have attempted) to make sensor toolkits. Repurposing, retooling, and reworking become key techniques in assembling and questioning the forms of action that these toolkits generate.

In this way, the Citizen Sense Toolkits were built through information from multiple forums, since there was no single official forum from which we might obtain guidance on how to make the monitoring technology “work.” We developed even more iterations of the Citizen Sense Toolkit, including a version 3, which included a Speck particulate matter sensor, an analog BTEX (or benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene, and xylene badge), a Frackbox (for monitoring volatile organic compounds and nitrogen oxides), a monitoring logbook, and a data platform. This version of the Citizen Sense Toolkit was later used to monitor pollutants from fracking at thirty community locations from fall 2014 to early summer 2015.70 Along the way, we foraged for diagrams and work-arounds, forked code from GitHub, and shoveled piles of breadboards, resistors, and cables across desktops. By rebuilding kits and gaining another perspective on the hardware and sensor configurations, we were also able to observe along the way what technical resources, capacities, and infrastructures these technologies require, as well as the decisions that were made or elided to create the monitoring kits in these particular ways, and the domains inhabited to generate and circulate environmental data through these contraptions.

By working with toolkits for sensing air pollution, we tested how these technologies enable certain types of monitoring and generate questions about the limits and possibilities of each of these monitoring practices for addressing environmental and political problems. The practice of making prototypes and setting up off-the-shelf sensors becomes a way to work through the instructions, promises, functions, and malfunctions of these devices. It also generates open-air instrumentalisms. In the process of procuring guides for air-quality sensors, making kits, following instructions, and installing devices in the open air, a number of splintering pathways came into view by deviating from a straightforward approach to these devices. Online forums read as tales of ongoing struggles to set up sensors, to maintain their operations, and to update and adjust when upgrades are available. FAQ sections are brimming with queries about connections, data, and modifications. Platforms bear the traces of half-finished efforts in running sensors, where maps of monitoring locations click out to nonexistent line graphs or inexplicable charts. These open-air instrumentalisms began to take on a more-than-technical quality as sensors were readied for installation and use, where an initial success at connection splintered into multiple concerns about the use or relevance of these devices.

But as noted earlier, this is not to say that devices never arrive at a condition of organized use or implementation. Instead, it is to signal how setting up citizen-sensing technologies is an ongoing trial, a back-and-forth effort of testing and tweaking. At the same time, despite the democratic selling points, many devices remain tied to practices focused primarily on technology and “making” and so can become somewhat self-referential in their pursuits, thereby missing the promise to address—and even improve—environmental problems. Yet if, as Dewey has suggested, the “invention of new agencies and instruments create[s] new ends,” then how do these new instruments “create new consequences” and “stir” us to “form new purposes”?71 This is a question about instruments and instrumentality, which the next section considers in a more reflective key.

Instruments and Instrumentality

Instruments are the tools, devices, and contraptions constituted as they do work in the world. An instrument can be a sensor, a data logger, a toolkit. There are also conceptual instruments, discursive instruments, and policy instruments. An instrument could standardize and measure and also construct and generate. Instruments and instrumentality mobilize inquiry and experimentation while organizing observation and action. Are instruments generative of an expanded instrumentality, or are they prescriptive in their engagements and outcomes?

Instruments are often described as “mere” or “passive” or “functional” devices. Simondon suggests that an instrument-based view of technology tends to be reductive. He writes that the technological object has been “treated as an instrument” considered in relation to economics, work, or consumption but has not been engaged with through philosophical or cultural deliberations.85 Unlike cultural objects, he suggests, technical objects are relegated to “a utility function” and do not enjoy “citizenship in a world of significations.”86 For Simondon, the designation of a technical object as an instrument is a way of focusing on its functionality only, where instrumentality seemingly has a predetermined outcome: to complete the task at hand. By suggesting that this is a way of denying technical objects a sort of citizenship, he seeks to diversify the entities from and through which meaning and sense—meaning as sense—materialize. Tools and technics, in other words, are cultural relations and expressions.

However, while in Simondon’s analysis an instrument might be seemingly fixed in its capacities and modes of observation or operation as well as outcomes, it is also subject to retooling. As Whitehead notes, language is not simply a tool used by philosophy; instead, “philosophy redesigns language in the same way that, in a physical science, pre-existing appliances are redesigned.”87 This redesign occurs in part because of the breakdown of that instrument, which occurs at the edges “of expressing in explicit form the larger generalities—the very generalities which metaphysics seeks to express.”88 As instruments are engaged in processes of inquiry, they are worked and reworked toward the edges of inquiry. These edges of inquiry can be as sociopolitical as they are “technical.” Drone pilots and protectors who push technology to its limits convey this, as discussed in the introduction to this book. But breakdown and retooling are not the only conditions of this instrumental engagement. These conditions occur because instruments—in this case, language—are searching toward propositions of fact that are also referring to the pluriverse or worlds needed to sustain those facts.89

Flat-pack cosmologies surface again here, but from another angle. A world is not ready-made from a toolkit, nor is a toolkit as ready-made as it might have seemed to be. Instead, a world is required for instruments to be put to work, making both tools and worlds somewhat indeterminate in the inquiry to be undertaken, because they are in process. An instrument might reach toward something more fixed and absolute, since it will require its world to make sense, yet these are both in the making within practices of inquiry.90 The instruments and instrumentality that might have seemed to project toward a certain outcome instead generate open-air instrumentalisms. They form through relations and deviate from a fixed purpose. They take shape through distinct modes of inquiry.

These many components of scientific practice involve what Jenny Reardon and her coauthors refer to as the “material relationships that are part of knowledge-making practices, including political, social and cultural ones.”91 Instruments are always connected to a “multiplicity of entangled apparatuses” that include ethics and justice.92 While the focus could easily lead to human-makers taking up instrument-toolkits to address environmental problems, such a perspective would further demonstrate how instruments, observations, observers, and phenomena are entangled such that world making is a distributed and multi-agential affair. In this sense, apparatuses for Barad “are constituted through particular practices that are perpetually open to rearrangements, rearticulations, and other reworkings.”93 Resurfacing here is a certain breakdown and redesign—or retooling—that occurs not as the work of a willful human subject but rather as part of the shifting conditions in which instruments unfold through instrumental operations and relations. Open-air instrumentalisms are multi-agential and not only are the work of makers or tools but also erupt through situations, practices, other entities and relations, along with attempts to build breathable worlds.

In the process of making instruments, you might wonder whether your approach to sensing environments has become somewhat “instrumental” or, as usually designated, overly functional. But as this discussion begins to suggest, even that which seems to be defined as an instrument, and its instrumental outcomes, begins to break down and be retooled through practices of inquiry. Although instrumentality has acquired a negative connotation—to say that something is “instrumental” is to suggest that it is a grossly efficient means to an end—these critiques of a certain mode of causality deserve another look in the context of working with citizen-sensing instruments.94 Although citizen-sensing technologies are often wrapped in the promise of a simple means–end practice, where sensing the environment will generate political change, the instrumental operations of these instruments are never as simple as this. Instrumentality can demonstrate other modes of effect and effectiveness, not that of a reductive cause and effect but rather a multi-agential making of worlds.95 Although instrumentality might seem to generate a limited set of engagements, this revisiting of instrumentality from within the milieus of instruments-in-practice shows how more expansive modalities of action and practice can materialize.

Instrumentality is a mode of experience that might be productive of particular observations, expressions of citizenship, and relations with other collective entities for acting on problems of environmental pollution and environmental harm. Instrumentality, in this sense, necessarily becomes experimental in the process of undertaking concrete action. “Instrumental experimentalism” was a term and concept that Dewey used in a somewhat interchangeable way with “pragmatism” to refer to the contingency of “ends” within a philosophical—or democratic—project.96 On one level, Dewey was accounting for the rational unfolding of concepts in concrete situations that is central to the pragmatists’ approach to the instrumental. On another level, Dewey indicated how instrumentalism had implications for democracy—as a conceptual project always likely to generate struggle,97 contested relations, and modes of governance that are not direct or effortless instantiations of democratic principles.98 Or as West has suggested, such a “future-oriented instrumentalism,” which ran the risk of heroic or individual approaches to creative democracy, was also a search for strategies of “more effective action.”99

A propositional end might serve as a guide for concrete action, but it is always provisional and inevitably reworked through concrete experience and practice. Because an end is not merely arrived at, moreover, it is in many ways radical in relation to the instrumental experimentalisms it operationalizes but from which it also deviates. Instrumentalism for Dewey is about a process of experimentation, inquiry, and discovery. In this sense, it would be possible to say that instrumentalism has always been experimental. From instruments as logical concepts to instruments as material technologies, the rational unfolding that would occur instead gives way to even more prospective instrumentalities.

In this respect (and in contrast to Simondon), the instruments of citizen sensing are not instrumental enough, since they seem to guarantee an outcome that would foreclose the very undertaking of citizen-sensing practices as concrete experiences. This a priori designation of an outcome reduces not just the instruments and instrumentality but also the instrumental citizens that would materialize through these practices. Although the terminology is different, with this Simondon might agree: the conventional promises of citizen sensing constrict instruments into functional outcomes, a process that forecloses inquiry or experimentation. Here Simondon might be inclined to admit such instrumentalism to his analytical toolkit, because this does the work of reclaiming the processes of inquiry and open-endedness that he suggested were more appropriate to understanding and transforming human relations with technology. Shutting down and narrowing inquiry, as Dewey suggests, limits the modes of experience and political engagement that could be possible.

The instrumentalism developed here takes a cue from these pragmatist approaches to experimentation and inquiry and is informed by the open air that James found was necessary to practices of inquiry. “A pragmatist,” as James writes, “turns away from abstraction and insufficiency, from verbal solutions, from bad a priori reasons, from fixed principles, closed systems, and pretended absolutes and origins.” Instead, pragmatism involves a turn “toward concreteness and adequacy, towards facts, towards action and towards power.”100 Such an orientation directs inquiry toward “the open air and possibilities of nature, as against dogma, artificiality, and the pretence of finality in truth.”101 Open air, as I develop the concept with and beyond James, refers to an operationalized and prospective approach to inquiry. Open air pertains to lived experience, to processes of inquiry as they are unfolding, rather than to doctrines to which inquiry is made to conform.

Expanding on this aspect of James’s work, Dewey suggests that instruments in the form of ideas become “true instrumentally” through how they “work.” The working aspects of ideas were far more relevant than the final outcome that might seem to offer up a resolution or promise of truth. At the same time, instruments are also “a program for more work, particularly as an indication of how existing realities may be changed.”102 Open-air instruments and instrumentalisms are toolkits for action; they are able to generate change, above and beyond a static pronouncement of truth. Putting instruments to work in the open air is a process that is integral to practices to make more breathable worlds.103

Expanding on James and Dewey, I move from the unfolding of logical instruments to practices with technical instruments to suggest that instruments such as citizen-sensing technologies are more than a means to an end. As it turns out, it is only by undertaking practices and engagements with and through instruments that contingent relations and capacities—as well as citizens and worlds—begin to materialize, demonstrating that instrumentality has never been quite so straightforward as it might have seemed.104 This is the scope of open-air instrumentalisms: to demonstrate how sociotechnical practices are set to work and how they potentially work toward more breathable worlds. While Dewey sought to clear up the confusion about the terminology and meaning of instrumentalism, I work with this productive dissonance to query the trajectories and outcomes of sensing instruments. I propose the term open-air instrumentalisms as a way to indicate this revisiting and reworking of instrumentality within the context of DIY environmental sensors. This concept and term is about more than logical propositions, since it also expresses the prospective qualities of instruments and instrumentalities. Open-air instrumentalisms are a strategy and practice for breathable worlds, where breathability is an approach to instruments that opens into processes and exchanges.

The open air punctures any closed logic of instrumentalisms. Despite the imperative mood of guidebooks and toolkits that would suggest a quick passage from flat-pack cosmologies to actionable gadget, you will find that there is not a simple way to bend technology to your will. Instead, here are the toolkit, the instructional, the guidebook, and the instrument unfolding into the open air of instrumental experimentalism. Rather than instrumental reason giving way to a singular means–end trajectory, these are open-air instrumentalisms that, when put to work in the world as practice, concrete experience, and contingency, engage with and generate multiple inhabitations that struggle toward breathable worlds. Instruments not only contribute to organizing inquiry in particular ways; they also distribute inquiry across multiple entities and relations, creating new communities of inquiry—something I will address in the chapters that follow. Instruments are involved in tuning and in-forming environments, worlds, and political subjects that further trouble the usual scope of instrumentality: those instrumental citizens.

Instrumental Citizens

By drawing on multiple and diverging thinkers, I expand on the notion of what instruments and instrumentality might mean or generate. There are many different uses of the term instrument across these thinkers, and they are by no means synonymous. The instruments of Simondon are merely functional technologies; the instruments of James and Dewey are theories and ideas put to work in the world; the instruments of Whitehead become part of practices of inquiry; and the instruments of Barad expand out to relational, material, and entangled apparatuses. If Whitehead’s remark quoted at the beginning of this section has much to say about science and instruments, it says less about the subjects caught up in these instrumental practices. Who or what are these instrumental entities? If “citizens” are monitoring environments with sensing instruments, do they become instrumental citizens? Are they instrumentalized in the conventional or in the pragmatist sense? And do they realize new political competencies through their instrumentalist practices, which theorists of feminist technoscience, Black studies, and Indigenous theory develop as strategies of retooling technologies and action?

Suppose the citizen took shape through the pragmatist sense of the instrumental. In that case, it would mean that the democratic commitments of political subjects are continually put to work. Through this work, the very meaning of citizen would come to have consistency. Citizen practices then generate the reality and community of citizens, as well as the transformed instruments that would further spur this work along.105 Instrumental citizens are not rationalized actors completing a designated task—the reductive or functional sense of instrumental. Rather, they are contingent subjects involved in making and remaking—tooling and retooling—political life. As ongoing work in environmental justice has demonstrated, the retooling of instruments occurs along with the transformation of politics and action to work toward less polluting environments.106

A citizen-sensing kit comprises citizens as much as sensors. Yet the “citizen” is not an entity that can be wired and coded in the same way as a microcontroller. Instead, what the citizen is or could become is in-formed by sensors and the extended milieus in which they operate. The “citizen” in these toolkits is meant to be an action-based entity. This is a citizen imagined to be an empowered and effective technophile. The instrumented citizen is an instrumental citizen, in the usual sense of realizing a stated outcome through direct and efficient action. In this sense, the instrumental citizen is a tool-kitted citizen.

Yet the logic and expediency of sensing instruments and instrumental citizens, along with their ability to effect change, is a narrative that leaves the details of technical and political engagement unexamined. It is worth pausing to examine in more detail the usual diagram of how action is meant to unfold and how the designations and expressions of citizens and citizenship are performed through sensing technologies. For instance, Plume Labs, which has developed a wearable Flow sensor and an AI-powered app for forecasting air pollution, focuses on how citizens as sensors might monitor their own air to protect themselves and their families from high pollution levels.107 While they suggest that collective sensing projects are possible, Plume manages and oversees the collected and collective data so that they are not readily available for use and analysis by communities. Plume emphasizes personal action and protection and brackets collective action as a less relevant or feasible use of sensors. This arrangement might assure user–consumers that by monitoring their air they are not sliding into the dangerous depths of citizen activism. Instead, they can maintain a more innocuous engagement with technology to protect themselves and their families. Engagement becomes a more nuclear and normative undertaking, less inclined to the sprawling affiliations of democratic communities beyond the family.108

Such a configuration of subjects is one of vulnerable and responsible family members managing their personal air space in a politically neutral manner. The air here becomes more like an atmosphere of air-conditioning and security—an area of instrumental control rather than open-air instrumentalisms.109 Citizen-sensing instruments facilitate these environmental practices, thereby shoring up a particular citizen-as-consumer engagement with the problem of air pollution. This is not an isolated example of how many consumer-based air-pollution technologies are now being promoted, whether in the European Union or the United States, China or India: the focus is on managing and protecting oneself and one’s family members in controlled personal spaces. Instruments and instrumentality give rise to awareness, personal protection, and responsibilization, rather than collective organization, environmental transformation, or strategies for building breathable worlds.

In other words, these “aware” subjects are not directed to intervene in current operating conditions to undertake democratic struggles toward more breathable collective atmospheres. Instead, they are made aware so as to better manage their own individual exposure. Of note here is that citizen-sensing technologies for monitoring air pollution are increasingly shifting away from DIY and makerly technologies toward finished consumer products. As a result, instruments could become locked into organizing and directing technopolitical engagements. In this context, they do not as readily give rise to open-air instrumentalisms. Instead, they potentially direct user–consumers to a series of corrective or adaptive actions not dissimilar to a cybernetic logic that Simondon critiqued for its functional approach to technical objects, which overlooked how technologies undergo processes of concretization as they in-form subjects and environments, or citizens and worlds.110

Here the citizen also becomes utility-like in the imaginings of citizen-sensing technologies, as an entity able to singularly and instrumentally effect change. But the reflections of Dewey suggest that we might consider other forms of instrumentality in relation to politics. Following the pragmatists, Antonia Majaca and Luciana Parisi also suggest that instrumentality is not instrumental, at least not in the way it is usually conceived. Through a more thorough engagement with the logic of technē, they suggest it might be possible to try “reversing the very understanding of instrumentality,” which could be undertaken “by fully acknowledging instrumentality, politicizing it, and ultimately transcending it.”111 In their estimation, transcending instrumentality entails recognizing that subjects are also contingent, and this contingency is where the political materializes through concrete practices.112

Instrumental citizens might be sparked through instrumental practices, but they are in formation since they are involved in making worlds. In any given situation, instrumentality involves prospective engagements, which constitute the political. A further elaboration upon the concept of an instrumental citizen would then involve taking up Dewey’s notion of “instrumental experimentalism” as the mobilization of what a political subject is or could be.113 As previously discussed, this is less a fixed mode of engagement and more an opening into how the citizen as attractor and force can stir people to new purposes.

Such engagements do not constitute technical solutions but are provisional practices that transform technologies and politics. Instrumentalism is not a test for the sake of a test or an experiment for the sake of an experiment. Instead, it is a practice guided by ideas, technologies, and toolkits that seek to do a certain amount of work, and even possibly (political) transformation, in the world. The fact that instruments and instrumentalities are unlikely to fulfill their stated aim is not a limit but rather is crucial to testing instruments and ideas for further development. As James writes when discussing the work of Dewey, “theories thus become instruments, not answers to enigmas, in which we can rest.”114 This may explain why Dewey used the term instrumentalism as well as instrumental experimentalism to describe this putting to work of instruments.115 Experimental describes the contingent and open-ended modes of action, but instruments are the things and concepts put to work and reconfigured through experimental processes.116 Hence the relevance of this discussion for understanding what a citizen—as an instrumental citizen—is and might become through engagements in the open air.

The point of revisiting and reworking instrumentalism as open-air instrumentalisms is not to recuperate a reductive notion of technical or political action but instead to consider how neither citizens nor machines have ever been so instrumental in the usual sense of the word. The adoption of a citizen-sensing instrument does not make for a more direct realization of a citizen-scientific or citizen-political impact. Instead, it organizes modes of inquiry, social relations, facts, and worlds. Instrumentality describes the instrumental commitments that unfold through practice and in the open air. The logic of sensing used to promote these technologies as a direct solution to environmental pollution could be understood as a form of instrumental reason that diminishes a more contingent and experimental understanding of instruments and inquiry. Instrumental reason is bound to bend, and instruments unfold through contingent operations. Political projects and struggles thus become activated and entangled with instrumental experimentalism.

When taken up and put to work, the instruments and instrumentalities of citizen-sensing technologies break down, open up, and are retooled through particular practices and situations. Instrumental citizens, in this sense, are political subjects (which are also not necessarily always human subjects) that work through the problem of sensing environmental pollution to make more breathable worlds. Here it might be possible to suggest that technical objects could be granted “citizenship in a world of significations,” as has previously been discussed through Simondon. However, such citizenship is never settled. Instead, it is undertaken through the differential and multidirectional practices of human and nonhuman instrumental citizens as they sense and rework toolkits toward more breathable worlds.

Communities of Inquiry

The practice of building a community-monitoring network involves building and drawing on communities of inquiry. The process of taking an instrument into the open air does not merely consist of testing or setting up a device. Instead, a toolkit develops along with networks and inquiries. “Community of inquiry” is a concept that Charles Sanders Peirce developed to describe scientific modes of inquiry and how reality, facts, and truth are settled on through collective processes.121 This phrase was taken up by other pragmatists, such as Dewey, to de-scribe how concrete practices of inquiry generate realities that are particular to groups undertaking such work. For Dewey, these modes of inquiry become political, informing the possibilities and struggles of democratic life.122

The how-to can involve multiple processes of inquiry. But this is not merely an abstract set of instructions followed by a universal subject. Instead, the how-to as inquiry is situated within communities. Together with these formations of communities, inquiry, and facts, instruments transform with communities of inquiry.123 This expands communities of inquiry to include nonhumans in their technical and fleshy arrangements and instantiations. This approach to the how-to process becomes less about a maker tinkering with a digital object and more about the collective constitution of worlds. How-to is a way of organizing and asking how to go about something, including how to make a world. How are communities of inquiry organized in relation to environmental problems? What are their practices, tactics, and strategies? But the question does not merely document the occurrence of networks. Instead, it also contributes to the prospective formation of networks. This is part of what you might attend to when making a citizen-sensing toolkit.

As a prospective undertaking, inquiry is a mode of transformation. Another approach to the how-to materializes here, where “how” indicates or asks in what manner, by which means, and how it might be possible to organize ways of life. “How” indicates procedure, practice, and process. The imperative mood shifts to become less commanding and more aligned with a specific obligation and necessity. In Imperatives to Re-imagine the Planet, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak outlines a mode of the imperative that involves recasting the relations of subjects through planetary connections that exceed that which can be designated or made commensurate with subjects.124 The imperative in this sense is as much an opening as a responsibility, a proposition as well as a commitment to justice. “How” attends to the mode of engagement and the imperative of attending to what is at stake in attending to and attempting to address (if not redress) planetary troubles.

Here, the how-to opens up to engage with another register of the imperative: the crucial actions that contribute to lived engagements that remake worlds. Elaborating on this aspect of the how, Indigenous theorist and writer Leanne Betasamosake Simpson writes in relation to Nishnaabeg thought and practice, “It became clear to me that how we live, how we organize, how we engage in the world—the process—not only frames the outcome, it is the transformation. How molds and then gives birth to the present. The how changes us. How is the theoretical intervention.”125 How is the world-making process that traverses ways of life, modes of politics, registers of experience, and integrities of relation. It forms subjects and environments in its indication toward engagements. It is both a theoretical orientation and an embodied collective practice.

Expanding Practices of the How-To

When using sensors in the open air, the question of how to assemble toolkits expands into other orders of instrumentality and the how-to. Is this just a matter of distributing air-pollution sensors to a community? Or is this process a way of forming new networks and communities of inquiry? And if it is the latter, then how might it be possible to expand upon the makerly way of encountering sensors to engage with these devices as more fully social technologies that are constituted in and through diverse more-than-makerly social environments? How-to is a question that activates and indicates how to address that problem.126 The how-to of citizen-sensing toolkits frames the problem of environmental pollution as one of measurable quantities that can be documented and communicated as evidence. Yet this how-to also organizes an expanded set of practices, from how to build a community-monitoring network that responds to the sited problem of pollution to how to draw on community expertise and connections and how to gather observations and experiences of environments over time.

As one example of an approach to exploring this expanded configuration of the how-to, Citizen Sense built upon its ongoing practices of meeting with community groups and residents concerned about air quality by developing a “Logbook of Monitoring Practices.” The logbook, discussed further in chapter 2, sought to approach the how-to through collaborative research and action.127 The logbook was one part of the Citizen Sense Toolkit that organized techniques to constructively and collectively ask about the how: how to build a toolkit, how to use sensors, how to monitor, how to use data, and how to effect improvements to environments and environmental pollution. This was not a process that started from a preformed assumption about what technology is or ought to be; rather, it asked what it could become within a community of inquiry committed to collective engagement with environmental problems. You might find that by asking questions about the how-to with a more low-tech device, such as a logbook, it can be possible to configure an expanded toolkit through a process of collective research.

In this way, our first “Logbook of Monitoring Practices” was developed as a series of questions to ask participants about how they would document the problem of air pollution from fracking. These questions were entry points into the how-to: they asked how to monitor this complex and fraught environmental problem that people had struggled with for years. These questions could be worth considering when developing your own toolkit that seeks to build community-monitoring networks. The questions include the following:

From Makerverse to Pluriverse

Making is often discussed as a good or end in and of itself, especially in the sphere of digital technology. Action, getting practical, building, working in a hands-on way: these are proposed as remedies to more sclerotic and inert—indeed, even “academic”—approaches to problems. As Lily Irani has observed about an account of a hackathon, there was a notable “bias for action” in the planning for this event, where hackathon participants “sought to intervene in the operations of the world through ‘action’ and ‘making.’”128 Such emphasis on making and action can constitute a makerly subject—or instrumental citizen—who undertakes activities because they seem productive. Yet, as the pragmatists have discussed and critiqued, action for action’s sake is an empty project. Practice is, notwithstanding, the space within which ideas are put to work. It is the very operationalization of ideas—the instrumental aspect of instruments—that the pragmatists stressed was key to how inquiry unfolded and came to have effects, less as the proof of a theory and more as contingent and concrete experience.

In a different but parallel register, Simpson notes that distinct approaches to making are part of the integral connection between Indigenous knowledge and practices. Making can be “the material basis for experiencing and influencing the world.”129 Her discussion of making and theory is tied to Indigenous contexts, and it also produces a philosophy that differently resonates with the pragmatists’ approach to practice. Yet Simpson further draws out how the collective undertakings of Indigenous politics and governance are also embodied and implemented through distinct forms of making, politics, and governance. She writes:

Kinetics, the act of doing, isn’t just praxis; it also generates and animates theory within Indigenous contexts, and it is the crucial intellectual mode for generating knowledge. Theory and praxis, story and practice, are interdependent, cogenerators of knowledge. Practices are politics. Processes are governance. Doing produces more than knowledge.130

The more-than-knowledge that doing produces involves the very relations and networks that make worlds—and these are political inquiries and inhabitations. Just as making does not take place simply for the sake of making or action, doing is about more than a refinement of theories. Doing unfolds ways of being in and being for worlds. Doing can reproduce practices such as settler colonialism. But it can also test, transform, and generate theories in a connected pursuit of the how-to that works toward more breathable worlds. As forms of doing and action, instruments and instrumentalities are not, in this way, direct lines to certain outcomes but rather constitutive and contingent operations that form worlds.

The imperative mood resurfaces here, less as instruction and more as procedure and practices that form networks and worlds. Procedure is always open to revision through ways of living in and making worlds. Making involves differential ways of being in worlds. Making, action, practice, and procedure generate worlds in the plural, the pluralistic universe—or pluriverse—that was the focus of James in his work on radical empiricism.131 Here, instrumental citizens form with and through practices that would transform polluted environments by working toward more breathable worlds as a contingent and collective project.

As the “Logbook of Monitoring Practices” example demonstrates, there are multiple ways of monitoring environments and accounting for the effects of pollution through forming toolkits, making sensors, identifying monitoring scenarios, and gathering and analyzing data. How-to can be a way to recognize and support a plurality of modes of inquiry, technical practices, and environmental relations. The makerverse of DIY technologies shifts to become the pluriverse of reworked toolkits and action. The instruments and instrumentalities of sensors are not a unidirectional unfolding of makerly agency but rather networks-in-formation that generate collective effects.132 Citizen sensing unfolds not just through sensor devices but also in concrete locations and as collective monitoring projects for documenting and addressing environmental pollution. When building a network, you might find it helpful to remember that this is an ongoing practice involved in pluralistic fields of relations.