Making Sense Bali: open environmental sensing at the Jimbaran Hub Fab Lab

Bali pledged to the Fab City network in 2024. It is one of the newest members of a network that now spans more than 60 cities -- and one of the most interesting, because it is doing something that most Fab Cities have not yet attempted at scale: building a community environmental sensing network from the ground up, using open hardware, in a place where the relationship between people and environment is both ancient and acutely threatened.

The Making Sense project at the Jimbaran Hub Fab Lab is part of this effort. Jimbaran is a coastal community in the south of Bali -- known for its fishing village, its beach, and increasingly for the pressures of tourism development on its coastline and water systems. The Fab Lab sits at the intersection of these pressures and the community that lives with them.

What Making Sense is doing

Making Sense is a methodology as much as a project. It brings together open hardware -- Smart Citizen sensors -- with community participation and data literacy. The goal is not just to collect data, but to help communities understand what the data means and what they can do with it.

At Jimbaran, this means measuring air quality, temperature, humidity and noise in a coastal environment that is changing rapidly. The data is published openly to the Smart Citizen platform, where it is accessible to anyone -- researchers, residents, policymakers, and other Fab Cities building similar networks.

Smart Citizen device #19236 is one of the reference nodes on our Observatory page. When you look at the Bali readings, you are seeing real data from Jimbaran -- a coastal community in Bali, 9,000 kilometres from Cape Town, asking the same questions we are beginning to ask here.

The Jimbaran Hub Fab Lab

The Jimbaran Hub Fab Lab is not a conventional Fab Lab. It is embedded in a community that has a deep relationship with its environment -- the ocean, the rice fields, the volcanic landscape of Bali's interior. The lab's work on sensing is inseparable from this context: the data it collects is not abstract; it is about the place where people live.

The lab is also a node in the global Fab City network -- connected to Fab Lab Barcelona, to the Smart Citizen platform, and to the growing community of cities and labs that are building open environmental sensing infrastructure. When Bali's data goes onto the Smart Citizen platform, it becomes part of a global dataset that researchers and makers everywhere can learn from.

This is the logic of the Fab City network: local experiments, properly documented and shared, improve the global network. What Jimbaran learns about sensing in a coastal tropical environment is relevant to Cape Town, to Singapore, to any city trying to understand its relationship with its environment through open data.

What this means for Cape Town

Cape Town's sensing network is in development. When our first nodes come online -- at the ARC of Franschhoek and at Menzies Design Lab UCT -- they will join the same global Smart Citizen network that Jimbaran is already part of. Our data will be open, our methodology will be shared, and our questions will be legible to the global community of practice.

The Making Sense approach is directly relevant to what we are trying to do. Not just deploying sensors, but building the community capacity to understand and act on the data. Not just measuring the environment, but asking what data would actually be useful for the people who live here.

Jimbaran is a reference node in more than one sense. The data from device #19236 is a reference signal for our Observatory. And the Making Sense methodology is a reference model for how we want to build our own sensing network -- community-led, open, and connected to the global network of cities asking the same questions.