Thank you for choosing to learn more about the University of Washington’s interdisciplinary Smart & Connected Communities (S&CC) project, funded by the National Science Foundation (NSF). We are excited to share our work with you.
When a disaster strikes, communities often become isolated, and citizens come together to help each other: people share resources, pass along information, and take on tasks that are outside their usual comfort zone. Some examples include New Yorkers sharing private vehicles and boats during the 2005 MTA strike that crippled NYC transit services; and neighbors helping neighbors escape from flooding caused by 2016’s Hurricane Matthew using rafts improvised from inflatable mattresses in Rowland, NC.
These peer-to-peer resource sharing activities fill important gaps during times of disaster that cannot be fulfilled by emergency response agencies. This project helps fill this gap by working closely with two very different communities in Washington State (Westport, WA and Seattle’s Laurelhurst neighborhood). This will help us to understand how different people and communities share information and resources during disasters, and how they work together to become more resilient during the challenges of daily life.
Our project brings together different ways of learning about disaster resilience in communities. This includes surveys, community design workshops, and building new technologies. The community members we are working with will be “co-designing” with us, ensuring that what we create works well in its specific setting. Community design workshops will bring together people living in the community to discuss issues that are important to them and how technology could help them meet their needs during challenging situations. As we learn more about these needs, we can get better at creating tools to meet them.
We are working to build and install rugged "off-grid" hardware, like Wi-Fi access points, that people can use when normal infrastructure might become less reliable. We also hope to create information technologies, like smartphone applications, that can support community resilience in a variety of ways. We hope to use what we learn from the project to develop and pilot test new applications that can potentially be useful in other communities as well.
The project is being conducted by a diverse group of researchers across the University of Washington. Professors Cynthia Chen (Civil & Environmental Engineering), Dan Abramson (Urban Design and Planning), Kurtis Heimerl (Computer Science and Engineering), Shuai Huang (Industrial & Systems Engineering), and Tyler McCormick (Statistics, Sociology) are leading the work. This project also relies heavily on close relationships with a number of community partners. These include Laurelhurst’s LEAP, Seattle Community Network, Ocosta Elementary School in Westport, and Grays Harbor County Emergency Management.