Maker-Based Environmental Data Collection for Inclusive Mobility Education | JustMOBI
As part of the program, the Fab Lab Barcelona team facilitated a hands-on Maker-Based Environmental Data Collection Workshop, bringing a practical, exploratory approach to the broader conversations on digital transformation and inclusive mobility education.
In April 2026, a team from Fab Lab Barcelona (IAAC) took part in the JustMOBI Faculty Workshop in Warsaw, hosted within Work Package 2 – Digital Transformation for Innovative and Inclusive Education. The workshop brought together educators, researchers, and practitioners from across Europe to collectively rethink how mobility, data, and inclusion can be woven into higher education curricula. We didn’t just attend — we rolled up our sleeves.
Learning through making: environmental data as a shared resource
The session introduced participants to maker education methodologies as a way to engage with environmental and mobility data — not as abstract figures on a screen, but as something tangible, participatory, and deeply community-driven.
Rather than treating data as a purely technical matter, the workshop foregrounded:
- Hands-on engagement with environmental sensing and data collection
- Open design principles, encouraging transparency and adaptability of tools and methods
- Community participation, positioning citizens and students as active contributors to knowledge — not just consumers of it
- Learning-by-doing, where experimentation is the method, not just the means
The day before the session, three Smart Citizen sensors were quietly placed in specific locations around the university. During the workshop, participants weren’t told where. Instead, they were handed the data — temperature, noise, light, barometric pressure — and asked to work backwards: from numbers to context, not the other way around. A small act of reverse engineering that turned a data exercise into a lived experience.
Participants explored how environmental and mobility data can be collected, interpreted, and used as a foundation for more inclusive and responsive urban design and planning processes.
Connecting making, data, and just mobility
The workshop sat within the broader objectives of the JustMOBI project, which aims to develop innovative and inclusive educational approaches for mobility transitions.
Within this context, the Fab Lab Barcelona session contributed to WP2 by:
- Demonstrating how maker-based methodologies can support digital and data literacy
- Linking environmental sensing practices to urban mobility and sustainability challenges
- Encouraging critical reflection on how data is produced, who produces it, and how it shapes decision-making
- Supporting the co-creation of teaching approaches that are hands-on, interdisciplinary, and socially engaged
This approach aligns with the project’s emphasis on combining digital tools, inclusivity, and experiential learning to reshape higher education curricula.
From workshop to curriculum innovation
The Maker-Based Environmental Data Collection Workshop with our Smart Citizen technology was part of a wider two-day program that also included lectures, discussions, and curriculum co-creation sessions. Together, these activities aimed to move from individual learning experiences toward the development of shared educational frameworks.
Fab Lab Barcelona’s contribution highlighted how making and prototyping can become powerful pedagogical tools — not only for teaching technical skills, but also for fostering:
- Critical thinking around environmental and mobility systems
- Collaborative knowledge production
- Awareness of the inequalities embedded in urban infrastructures
- Genuine engagement with real-world data and contexts
Building a European community of practice
One of the key outcomes of the Warsaw workshop was the strengthening of a transnational community of practice connecting institutions in Poland, Ireland, Spain, and beyond. Fab Lab Barcelona’s presence within this network reflects its ongoing commitment to open, experimental, and socially engaged educational methodologies.
Through initiatives like JustMOBI, educators and practitioners are collectively exploring how higher education can better respond to the challenges of digital transformation, sustainability, and urban mobility justice.
Looking forward
Participating in the JustMOBI workshop in Warsaw reflects a broader mission: to keep experimenting with new ways of learning that integrate making, data, and real-world challenges — and to ask, again and again, why citizen-generated data matters:
- It fills gaps that official monitoring networks leave behind
- It empowers communities to understand and act on what affects them
- It enables real-time awareness of pollution spikes and environmental change
- It builds stronger cases for advocacy and policy change
- It links environment to health in ways people can feel and act upon
- It democratises science, shifting data ownership toward the public
- It encourages local solutions designed from within, not imposed from outside
The insights from Warsaw will continue to inform Fab Lab Barcelona’s work and the wider JustMOBI project as it develops new frameworks for innovative and inclusive education across Europe.