Uploaded on 2017-03-06 by Jack Hyland

Public libraries in Dublin, Ireland recently started allowing their using to borrow home energy saving kits (http://www.dublincity.ie/story/borrow-home-energy-saving-kit), a toolkit to help home owners measure their home’s heat efficiency and levels of water and electricity usage. I propose something similar: libraries providing speed radar guns to borrow for citizens, residents associations etc. concerned about excessive speeding in their neighbourhoods. Where the Citizen Design Science element would come into it would be that the radar guns would be smart devices which would automatically collate data on the speed of vehicles location and time. So long as potential data privacy issues are addressed, this data could be made automatically openly available online. This could of interest to: Other citizens, residents associations, allowing them to base their opinions on data Local authorities, to help them plan traffic management Local police, to help them plan future enforcement Researchers, obviously. They could do things like create heat-maps showing distributions of speeds across a city I think this would be of interest to a lot of people. Some people might simply be curious about having a gadget to play with for an evening. Or a geography teacher might want to use it with students as part of a field trip. Potential problems: Would probably need a level of training with the device and the ethics of use, eg not to use it in a confrontational way. This could be done by including an info booklet and training video with the device. Data protection legislation. Would need to be clear to users that their data must be anonymised, eg they could not take photos or record vehicle registrations alongside the radar readings and post them on social media. There would be a backlash from motorists fearing entrapment, mob-rule etc. but this would not stand up provided it was made clear that the devices could not and would not be used for enforcement, only as research. On further thought, this model could work for a range of other smart devices: how about borrowable pollution measuring tools? Jack Hyland March 2016