cityin thestress

Joe Gray, Qijing Huang, Dania Peterson, Nikki Pfarr, Peter Zapf | Design Planning | Fall 2008

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Megacities = MegasYsteMs

Urban growth creates megacities with massive problems…huge opportunities.

By 2007 3.3 billion people—more than half of the world’s population—will be living in cities. The total may even reach 60% by 2030. Such rapidly increasing urbanization, particularly in developing countries, creates many opportunities and challenges for individuals, businesses, and governments.

The largest of these urban centers are called Megacities.

According to planetearth®, Earth Sciences for Society, Megacities are more than just large cities. Their scale creates new dynamics, new complexity, and a new simultaneity of events and processes. Comprised of a multitude of interconnected systems, Megacities also host intense and complex interactions between different demographic, social, political, economic, biological and ecological processes.

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stress in megacities is difficult to define and measure. Yet, it puts us all at risk.

Eons of evolution have given us a robust set of biological systems allowing humans to adapt to environmental stresses better than any other species on Earth. Yet prior generations could never have imagined today's rate of change and the increasing complexity of the world in which we now live.

Stress occurs when environmental demands tax or exceed the adaptive capacity of a system, resulting in physical, psychological, and biological changes that may place persons at risk or negatively influence quality of life. The megacities are full of stimuli that may induce stress, including: transportation systems, ambient noise, super-saturated messaging channels, high population density.

Though stress is considered a contributing factor in roughly 50% of deaths, according to the U.S. Center for Disease Control, it is difficult to define, elusive to measure, and ultimately complicated to visualize. Mental and emotional stress increase as cities grow, modernize, and become more populous, yet we have no wide-scale systemic understanding of stress factors on the individual and society.

Megacities = Megastress

environmental Demands (stressors or life events)

appraisal of Demands and adaptive capacities

Negative emotional responses

Physiological or Behavioral responses

increased risk of Physical Disease

increased risk of Psychiatric Disease

Percieved stress Benign appraisal

Source: Strategies for Measuring Stress in Studies of Psychiatric and Physical Disorders by Cohen, Kessler, and Gordon.

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We can’t fix what we can’t see. Visualizing stress is the first step in finding a solution to this urban crisis.

A person under stress displays few overt cues of their condition. Perhaps their hand is clutching and rubbing the back of their neck. Maybe their brow is furrowed and filled a few beads of perspiration. Is their heart racing? Given the subtleness of these indicators (and our best efforts to appear in control), even the most self-aware and empathic of us will have difficulty in detecting whether someone, ourselves included, is feeling stressed.

And because we can’t fix what we don’t understand, it is vital that stress be visualized in a simple, easy-to-comprehend manner. Such a display would provide an increased awareness of our own stress, enabling us to better understand, manage, and prevent it.

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canari is stress visualized.

We propose that a means of measuring and visualizing stress through space and over time will assist individuals, social groups, and the public and private sectors with better understanding and ameliorating stress in the urban setting.

Our concept collects bio-feedback data in conjunction with GPS coordinates, then aggregates and visualizes this data, providing context, stress status, and potential empathetic responses for the individual user on a one-to-one, one-to-some, and one-to-many basis.

OUr cONcePt

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canari: a tool for individualsWith Canari, measuring stress is as simple as carrying on a conversation. As a freeware application for GPS-enabled smartphones, Canari collects and analyzes data on the user's voice patterns (e.g. amplitude, frequency, and cadence) along with concurrent ambient noise to produce a visualization of stress level relative to personalized preset norms. Using GPS, stress levels are correlated with location and movement.

Canari users thus benefit from a real-time, location-based representation of their stress level, allowing them to better understand, manage, and prevent their symptoms accordingly. In addition, users can allow their personal network of family, friends, and health care providers to access their stress data. Canari users thus benefit from unprecedented interconnected empathy and stress care.

ONe tO ONe

Stressed

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Canari Control Panel

Canari

data generationfree servicesubscription & affiliate feesaggregation, analysis

and activation

subscription & consulting fees

aggregation, analysis and real-tim

e mapping

improved consumer experience

improved urban living

improve

d commerci

al zoning

Canari users can access and track their personal stress data online. Adapted from b2b.

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canari: a tool for businesses

The Canari platform is a robust analytic tool and communication channel for stress-related products and services. Stress data from Canari end-users is masked for anonymity and aggregated in a centralized database. Through subscription-based services including real-time stress visualization dashboards, business clients can better tailor product and service offerings to end-user scenarios.

For example, a spa franchise could subscribe to the database as a means of pinpointing high-stress urban locations where people are most likely to purchase their services. A pharmaceutical company could use the database to determine where to test-market and promote stress-relieving drugs. Further, businesses could benefit from pushing communications to end-users tailored to their stress level and location.

ONe tO sOMe

data generationfree servicesubscription & affiliate feesaggregation, analysis

and activation

improved customer experience

subscription & consulting fees

aggregation, analysis and real-tim

e mapping

improved urban living

improve

d commerci

al zoning

Businesses can send promotions to Canari users’ smartphones.

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canari: a tool for government and city Planners

Visualizing real-time stress data will revolutionize the way cities are planned, serviced, and governed. By correlating real-time encrypted and anonymous end-user stress data with situational data, city governments can better understand the relationships between urban infrastructure and the human condition.

Traffic conditions, health data, geodemographics, and crime data can be overlaid with real-time stress visualization to better manage city planning, social services, and public health and safety in accordance with the stress of a given population. The Canari platform offers an array of data synthesis and visualization services that makes real-time stress monitoring and management possible.

ONe tO MaNY

data generationfree servicesubscription & affiliate feesaggregation, analysis

and activation

subscription & consulting fees

aggregation, analysis and real-tim

e mapping

improved consumer experience

improved urban living

improve

d commerci

al zoning

Stress maps visually depict locations of peak stress within a megacity. Source: Christian Nold, Biomapping.net

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How canari will take flight.

Rollout of the Canari platform will occur over three phases. Four streams of development are key to the successful launch of the concept and its managed growth. We imagine avid user of smartphones to be early adopters of Canari because they are more likely to be: working more; earning more; consuming more, especially information/news likely to increase overall stress levels; sharing the applications they “discover.” Such potential Canari users are also more likely to be aware of the need to ameliorate stress, but lack the means to do so effectively.

Canari, and its platform of interconnected empathy, allows people to make a simple, but often difficult, request - “Help me.”

HOW aND WHY

Key functions and features

Key brand and marketing

Sales

Talent

Affiliation with empathy providers

Push customized stress relief suggestions to users

Provide aggregated data to third parties

Co-branded services

Advertising campaigns

Selling aggregated data to third parties

Connecting empathy providers with targeted individuals

Account executives for public and private sectors

Individual stress monitoring and awareness

Track voice stress, ambient noise, and GPS via cell phones

Users do self-directed search for stress relief suggestions

Introduce Canari brand via icon system, website

Word-of-mouth campaign to generate buzz

Service available to individuals as freeware

Deal makers

Programmers, Data visualizers, Designers

Lawyers

Network with friends, family, doctors , stress experts

Introduce additional sensors and technologies

Users pull stress relief suggestions from provided set

Develop data aggregation and analysis tools

Co-branded sensors and technologies

PR campaign emphasizing medical benefits

Additional features available to individuals via subscription

Data aggregators, Data analysts

Stress experts

Phase I Phase Ii Phase III

Once a sufficient cross-section of consumers have adopted Canari, businesses and government entities will benefit from a representative visualization of population stress.

What makes Canaris remarkable is its ability to make tangible an internalized feeling. According to leading experts like the Mayo Clinic, not a day in your life goes by without encountering a situation or event that may trigger stress. And that’s OK. Some acute stress spurs action or provides thrills that make aspects of life exhilarating. However, stress that becomes chronic is a problem that needs to addressed. By identifying and understanding the sources of stress, people learn to better manage it.

canari rollout

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getting people to take it easy won’t be all that easy.

According to the September 2008 issue of Scientific American, public sharing of private lives has led to a rethinking of our current conceptions of privacy. Yet even with growing numbers of people Twittering life’s minutia, we recognize users’ heightened sensitivity when their health is involved. Fortunately, people are gaining effective tools to control what personal information they want to give out and to whom.

Canari will employ concepts such as anonymous authorization and degrees of disclosure to ensure as much privacy as possible. We will explore the safeguards HIPAA and other privacy regulations can provide. Ultimately, in order to remove perceived barriers and enable rapid and robust adoption, Canari must be both trusted and valued by its users. Given that, we must remain vigilant against intrusions and unauthorized access to any personal information, ranging from rogue individuals and the the misuse by governing bodies.

cHaLLeNges

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every system has a stress threshold beyond which it fails.

Just as every species is comprised of systems, the world is also a collection of systems: environmental, energy, transportation, financial, sanitation, etc. Most, if not all, are interconnected and co-dependent in some way. We imagine the concept central to Canari—stress visualization—could be expanded to help visualize the stress of any system. Failure of such mega-systems is not an option, if we want life to continue and improve. For instance, air and water quality could be monitored, and the presence of harmful contaminants could be displayed. Making this information public, easily accessible, and personally relevant, could enable individuals and groups dedicated to improving (i.e., reducing the contributing factors that create stress)

such systems to mobilize others and engage local, state, national, and international governments.

In the grandest sense, interconnected empathy of all systems, as conceptualized and visualized by Canari, could help humanity, and the world in which we live, reach systemic harmony. A state where complexity is not maddening; it is invigorating. A place where we do not cope, but we all live well.

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