Jay
Jay is a 31-year-old chef who lives with his girlfriend in the Upper West Side section of New York City. He works a hectic schedule at a French bistro across town on the east side, but he loves the work and his city life in general. He’s found himself more tense lately; more on edge, less awake, and has started looking into monitoring his body and the world around him to see what’s behind it.
For the past week, he’s been using a personal sound monitor to track his daily exposure to abusive sound levels in his travels, and he’s found it a little discomforting to see what he’s been missing. He hadn’t noticed how loud his commute is, for example, but every time he exits the subway the monitor glows so brightly he shudders a little.
He’s started leaving it out in the kitchen too, and he’s found that the other staff members have come to check it too as they run about. People seem to yell a little less, but that of course could just be his imagination.
He’s only starting to use the device, but already he’s seeing changes. It’s now on the wallet-keys-phone list of things he grabs every day before leaving the house.
Kristen
Kristen is a 21-year-old retail clerk who works in midtown and lives in the Grove Street area of Jersey City. She’s also a student, going to CUNY at night for a design degree. She started in graphic design, but started finding herself wandering towards architecture as of late. Of course, this is all irrelevant —she’s late to work again, and sprinting through the subway.
She’s been wearing a personal monitor wearable for the past few days, and she likes how it conveys where she’s been to other people, even if they have no idea what it means. She’s caught people staring nearly every day at the glowing object attached to her bag, and has even stopped to talk to a few people about it. At home in her apartment, it glows a peaceful white, hung off the door hanger (except for when she’s cooking, as that’s often a loud-music-plus-wine affair). On the run in her daily life, it crosses between white and red, usually in some pinky form or another. She leaves the decay on long and the sensitivity on short so that she can get a pretty good picture of how her day sounds — bright red on subway trains, less red at work, sleepy and calm at night.
Recently, she’s started to want to share this personal experience with others, so she’s worked with a nerdy friend to make a few of the simpler versions to “tag” her space. She’s been carrying a bag of leave-behinds with her, smacking a few up in the PATH station, on the way to work, in her roommate’s room (she’s so loud!), in front of the church down the street. She feels it gives her a bit of a voice; lets her talk to the city without adding to the din. She’s also pleased that when the devices stay up for a few days, she can see what’s happened there and how recently. Of course, they don’t tend to make it a week, but that’s half the fun of public works anyway.
She hopes it’ll educate people and change the traffic patterns, but realizes people may not get it. For now, at least, it’s a good conversation piece. She palms one from her bag now, on the way home, and clicks it on. The ice cream place has been a little loud lately, she thinks with a smile.
Abhi
Abhi is a 42-year-old copy writer for an advertising firm, and an exceptionally good one at that. A happily married father of two, he values his weekends and has precious little time to spend trying to figure out how to best use them.
A twenty-year resident of New York City, Abhi has lived in a variety of neighborhoods, but considers Alphabet City his real home. He lives on Avenue A, right off Tompkins Square Park, and he makes good use of that location, heading to the park at least once a day if he can.
Abhi finds himself with a free Saturday morning, and with his wife Lucy out for a jog, he decides to take the kids to the park for a quick walk. He turns to his MacBook, consults the weather widget, and then does as he’s gotten in the habit of doing over the past few weeks — he heads to the Park Monitor website and takes a quick look at the noise and gas levels of park.

Taking a quick glance, he can see that there’s been some commotion in the upper section of the park (looks like it started on the B side of the park and headed towards A), and that there’s been some gases detected in the northwest, but that the southeast corner of the park has been downright peaceful. He decides to head that way and make use of quiet time with the kids.
There are times when he feels the opposite: he sees activity in parts of the park and can guess by the time of day and season that it means something exciting must be happening. Sometimes he pulls up the Park Monitor on his phone while he’s out and about to see if there’s anything going on, and if it looks like there’s a big event going on he’ll make his way over.

He finds himself using the phone application more and more these days, checking the park status as he’s running about. He’s liking it for checking when it’s been busy in the park (it’s how he found out about last week’s impromptu street fair!), but he’s annoyed that sometimes the system is a bit vague, leading him to confuse dogs barking a few weeks back for some sort of happy event. Still, he’s happy to have it. He’s not sure it’ll stick as a useful source, but for now he’s intrigued at least.
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