City as Learning Lab: Spreading Technological Fluency Through Creative Robotics
Pittsburgh has become home to an innovative experiment in which local communities creatively engage with robotic technologies for learning and change. The experiment began with Robot Diaries, a project in which female middle-school friend groups build robots for communication and creative expression. It continued with Neighborhood Nets, a program where neighbors participate in ongoing open studio sessions to discover their own innovative ways touse robotic sensing and imaging technology to identify data that helps them make arguments for urban planning and civic change in their local communities. Finally, it peaked when Robot 250 marks the 250th anniversary of the city with a series of workshops and open studios that enable the citizens of Pittsburgh to use robotic technologies to create public installations that creatively explore, document, interpret and express their material and social environment. As these related programs took root with diverse audiences and organizations in Pittsburgh, the city itself became a learning lab in ways that transcend the individual contributions of any university, informal learning organizations, or community group. We are now using a leverage strategy to multiply the impact of this work by using new NSF funding to build a systematic research component to developand document new measures of audience impact in technology experiences, identify features of university-community collaboration that facilitate sustainable community programs, and “shrink-wrap” a set of tools and resources that allow other cities to tailor creative robotics programs to their own unique audiences and needs.