The “Three-Legged Stool": Designing for Equitable City, Community, and Research Partnerships in Urban Environmental Madeleine I. G. Daepp ∗ Microsoft Research Redmond, WA, USA mdaepp@microsoft.com Raed Mansour Chicago Department of Public Health Chicago, IL, USA raed.mansour@cityofchicago.com Chuck Needham Microsoft Research Redmond, WA, USA chuck.needham@microsoft.com Sensing Alex Cabral ∗ Harvard University Cambridge, MA, USA acabral@g.harvard.edu Charlie Catlett University of Chicago and Argonne National Laboratory Chicago, IL, USA catlett@anl.gov Nneka Udeagbala University of California Irvine Irvine, CA, USA nudeagba@uci.edu Tifany M Werner Environmental Law & Policy Center Chicago, IL, USA tifwerner@outlook.com Asta Roseway Microsoft Research Redmond, WA, USA astar@microsoft.com Scott Counts Microsoft Research Redmond, WA, USA counts@microsoft.com ABSTRACT Urban environmental monitoring campaigns depend on expertise from city agencies, residents, and researchers. Deployment eforts rarely include all three stakeholders, typically leading to initia- tives that struggle to produce credible, actionable data. We describe the implementation of a large-scale, long-term air quality sens- ing network in Chicago Illinois; detail stakeholder interviews and meetings; and present three interfacesÐśa website accessible via in-situ QR codes, APIs, and a mobile, mixed-media experience. We show how a collaborative approach created a more equitable sensor distribution compared to crowdsourced or regulatory designs. We highlight shared goals of education, engagement, and empower- ment despite the diversity of tool and analytics needs across stake- holder groups. Refecting on our work, we develop a łthree-legged stoolž framework representing the criticality of balanced partici- pation from three key stakeholder groupsÐcity, community, and researchÐin deploying novel urban technologies. This approach can help HCI researchers facilitate more democratic technology deployments in urban spaces. CCS CONCEPTS • Applied computing → Environmental sciences;• Human-centered computing → Visualization design and evaluation methods; ∗ Denotes equal contribution. Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for proft or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the frst page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specifc permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from permissions@acm.org. Collaborative interaction; Web-based interaction; HCI theory, con- cepts and models; Empirical studies in ubiquitous and mobile com- puting. KEYWORDS Collaborative Design, Smart Cities, Environmental Monitoring, User Interfaces, Design Frameworks ACM Reference Format: Madeleine I. G. Daepp, Alex Cabral, Tifany M Werner, Raed Mansour, Char- lie Catlett, Asta Roseway, Chuck Needham, Nneka Udeagbala, and Scott Counts. 2023. The łThree-Legged Stool": Designing for Equitable City, Com- munity, and Research Partnerships in Urban Environmental Sensing. In Proceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ’23), April 23–28, 2023, Hamburg, Germany. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 19 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581289 1 INTRODUCTION Promoting environmental justice and fostering equitable climate adaptation are critical environmental challenges for 21st century cities [20, 110]. Dense networks of novel sensing technologies promise needed hyperlocal and real-time information [21, 43, 100], but success requires providing data that are both credibleÐachieving levels of accuracy and completeness needed to provide insightÐand actionable, or aligned with local priorities and advocacy needs. For deployments of novel environmental monitoring networks to meet these aims, three key stakeholder groups are critical [52]. First, researchers are essential to ensure data meet needed thresholds for accuracy, completeness, and usability, and to provide scien- tifc context for the work [91]. Second, city and government agen- cies are needed to provide authority for deployments [84] and to CHI ’23, April 23–28, 2023, Hamburg, Germany ofer insight on how the data can inform decisions and existing © 2023 Copyright held by the owner/author(s). Publication rights licensed to ACM. or new regulations [80, 108]. Third, local communitiesÐresidents ACM ISBN 978-1-4503-9421-5/23/04. . . $15.00 https://doi.org/10.1145/3544548.3581289 who share geographic proximity and thus share environmental