DATA Play 4 winners announced

This time around there were 12 ideas submitted. The panel had a tricky job looking at some wide ranging ideas and there was a heated discussion about which ones to pick.

The panel

  • The Chair of Plymouth open Spaces Network
  • The Active Neighbourhoods Officer
  • The Natural Infrastructure Officer
  • The DATA Play team

The winners

Rob Wick

Rob Wick will be creating a few prototype environmental monitoring stations using Bluetooth. These low cost devices will live around the city and help collect anonymous data about weather, air quality, temperature and most importantly, the movement of people around a space.

Rob said: “This money is a great opportunity to create, design and test a piece of equipment with the DATA Play community to ensure that it works in a way which gives great information, but protects peoples’ privacy.

“I see this being useful in green spaces, cafes, car parks and more. It will allow us to understand how people are actually using spaces instead of how we want them to use the space.’ The data from this can be layered over existing data sets and the data can be sanitised and made available.”

Leigh Cooper and Lucy Knight

Leigh and Lucy are going to investigate how green spaces modelled in Minecraft could increase engagement with the outdoors. They are taking a real green space in Plymouth, model it in Minecraft using accurate open lidar data, and run a set of classroom sessions, class trips and feedback activities to assess engagement levels.

This will result in an online resource for future visitors to the selected green space and a robust evidence base for the impact of virtual activity on engagement with real spaces.

Nudge Up

Something to do with rubbish…there were two great ideas submitted by Nudge Up, one to encourage and make it easier for people to recycle and one to reward people when they put rubbish in the bin. They will definitely get a reward but we will link them up the Street Services Team to make sure the project fits with wider work and can make a difference.

And an extra reward for Dave…

Dave worked his magic with spatial data to create a way to map our open data. We saw the potential in his work to make it easier for everyone to see and use the spatial data we are opening. We also want to work with Dave to explore how we use this to develop the proposals map for the Plymouth and South West Devon Local Plan.