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In the US, the challenges of an aging infrastructure network, coupled with requirements for maintaining continuous functionality of this network, highlights the need for innovative, and multidisciplinary solutions aimed at the timely detection and remediation of defects and deterioration before serious failure situations materialize. Considering the constant and widespread interactions of citizens with urban infrastructure systems, and the increasing ubiquity of mobile and personal electronic devices equipped with onboard sensing capabilities (e.g. camera, accelerometers, GPS, etc.), the concept of leveraging crowd-sourcing provides a promising data-driven solution for urban infrastructure monitoring. In this approach, the vision of the "citizen engineer" is introduced by empowering citizens to become "active human sensors" at the source of defect detection and data collection, thus extending the role of citizens from passive infrastructure users to active infrastructure monitors. In the proposed method, volunteers are motivated and instructed to use mobile devices to capture and send geo-tagged images of defects (e.g. cracks, corrosion, trip/slip hazards, potholes, etc.) that they observe in an urban infrastructure environment, including a short description and severity rating. The collected photos and descriptions are processed using object recognition techniques. Defects are identified and extracted from the photos and quantified, whereas additional information about the defects and their perceived severity are obtained from the description field. Beyond the local condition measures, the aggregate data provides responsible authorities with a quantitative analysis of the detected defects as well as a measure of importance and severity (i.e. heat maps), as perceived by the citizen, that can be used to inform maintenance decisions. While the challenges of this framework are discussed in detail, it is expected to be a highly promising departure from the traditional top-down infrastructure monitoring approaches.

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Planetary scientists are adept at producing knowledge about objects that are far removed from their lived experience of place and time. Sometimes, they overcome this distance by positioning Earth as a planet that can stand for other worlds. Encountering Earth becomes an encounter with another planet. When scientists experience the Earthly as otherworldly, they sometimes feel an excitement here described as “resonance.” Fully felt resonance is rare, but scientists devote much time and effort to preparing for it so as not to miss its fleeting instances. Just as resonance affords scientists the possibility of experiencing the distant, it also describes moments when the anthropologist is in harmony with what had previously been strange. Thus, resonance is a mode of cognitive and affective reasoning that collapses distance and transforms the similar into the same.

This article introduces the concept of the sociotechnical projectory to explore the importance of future-oriented discourse in technical practice. It examines the case of two flagship NASA missions that, since the 1960s, have been continually proposed and deferred. Despite the missions never being flown, it argues that they produced powerful effects within the planetary science community as assumed "end-points" to which all current technological, scientific, and community efforts are directed. It asserts that attention to the social construction of technological systems requires historical attention to how actors situate themselves with respect to a shared narrative of the future.