Field notes

We tested a mesh network among buildings and at street level, recording where links held, where they dropped, and how the network recovered.

The test used Meshtastic, a widely available open-source platform that sends short text messages over low-power LoRa radios, with no cell service or internet needed. We framed it around an ordinary use: keeping a team of event volunteers in touch across a busy downtown area, where phone networks often congest. Handheld nodes paired to phones over Bluetooth, and a few fixed nodes placed at height relayed messages between blocks.

Detailed results from this test are not published.

We tested sensors that gather atmospheric and other environmental data, and evaluated how far that data can be trusted as a basis for decision-making in the field.

The test used widely available sensors that log temperature, humidity, air pressure, wind and air quality, the kind of readings that inform ordinary outdoor planning. We framed it around an everyday use: deciding whether conditions at an outdoor site are safe and workable for a crew, and when to adjust a schedule as the weather turns.

Detailed results from this test are not published.

An engagement paired practical instruction with hands-on evaluation of several emerging technologies. The participants learned to operate the devices; in the course of learning, they also generated a grounded read on usability and limits that a bench test would not have produced.

Running the two together has a specific advantage. A device's real weaknesses tend to surface not in expert hands but in the hands of a competent newcomer under time pressure — which is also the population most device specifications quietly assume away. Defaults that an expert silently corrects, steps that are easy to get wrong, indicators that are read the wrong way: these appear immediately when ordinary users are learning, and they are exactly the failures that matter in use.

The output was twofold — trained users, and an evaluation of the technologies that reflected how they behave for people who are not their designers. We regard the second as inseparable from the first.