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The purpose of this paper is to provide local environmental information to raise community’s environmental awareness, as a cornerstone to improve the quality of the built environment. Next to that, it provides environmental information to professionals and academia in the fields of urbanism and urban microclimate, making it available for reuse.

The wireless sensor network (WSN) consists of sensor platforms deployed at fixed locations in the urban environment, measuring temperature, humidity, noise and air quality. Measurements are transferred to a server via long range wide area network (LoRaWAN). Data are also processed and publicly disseminated via the server. The WSN is made interactive as to increase user involvement, i.e. people who pass by a physical sensor in the city can interact with the sensor platform and request specific environmental data in near real time.

Microclimate phenomena such as temperature, humidity and air quality can be successfully measured with a WSN. Noise measurements are less suitable to send over LoRaWAN due to high temporal variations.

Further testing and development of the sensor modules is needed to ensure consistent measurements and data quality.

Due to time and budget limitations for the project group, it was not possible to gather reliable data for noise and air quality. Therefore, conclusions on the effect of the measurements on the built environment cannot currently be drawn.

An autonomously working low-cost low-energy WSN gathering near real-time environmental data is successfully deployed. Ensuring data quality of the measurement results is subject for upcoming research.

Research has shown that when presenting large amounts of social media information on small devices, design should consider multiple contexts which include user preferences, time, location, environment and so on. It should also take into account the purpose of use, for example, the kind of tasks undertaken by users. However, little research has been done on the organization of social media information by multiple context and tasks. The paper aims to discuss these issues.

Using tourism as a domain, the authors conducted a user evaluation study with a prototype to investigate users’ preferred ways of organizing different types of social media information based on multiple contexts.

In this paper, the authors present a sequence of context types for organizing four types of social media information (recommendations, events, friends and media elements). The study revealed that users preferred to view recommendations by location and environment context, events by location and temporal context, contacts by location and identity context and finally, list of media elements by environment and identity context.

There may be different sequences of context types for organizing social media information in domains other than tourism. Researchers are encouraged to analyze users’ needs in other domains so as to find their preferred ways of organizing social media information.

This paper includes implications for the design and development of user interface, in particular, for mobile applications presenting large amount of social media information.

It presents a new way of organizing social media information using multiple context types and with consideration of users’ needs.