The Lab, the map, and Gravel9 Radio
Research that helps people investigate a place—and helps radio tell them what is happening there.
Current direction and development roadmapRead entry
Research & publication arm — Unit 01
Digital Sidewalk Lab
Digital Sidewalk Lab is the research and publication unit of Pip Projects, Inc. It publishes the Digital Sidewalk framework and the research built on it, and it develops low-cost methods for civic and environmental observation. Founded 2024 by Darby Bailey McDonough, Ph.D.
Lab research methods and observation instruments.
Map a record of sources organized by place and time, in development.
Radio a listening product that can program from permitted sources, in development.
2025
Ph.D.
6+
Publications
IEEE
Member
24
Journal entries
Figure 1 · McDonough & Brown, 2025
About01
About the Lab
Digital Sidewalk Lab is the research and publication arm of Pip Projects, Inc. It houses the academic and pedagogical work of Darby Bailey McDonough, Ph.D., including The Digital Sidewalk — a measurable framework for entertainment-education grounded in Jane Jacobs’ urban sociology, Gordon Pask’s Interaction of Actors Theory, and Mitchell Duneier’s ethnographic methodology from his book Sidewalk. Research is peer-reviewed and presented at IEEE and national communication association conferences.
ORCID 0000-0003-4072-6191
Since 2026 the Lab also runs a civic and environmental sensing platform. Preprints are open access. A storm dataset has been collected; public release is pending.
Three names
- Digital Sidewalk Lab
- The Digital Sidewalk
- Digital Sidewalk
Journal02
Journal
Research entries and journal entries, each labeled by the kind of evidence behind it. The first entry describes the Lab, the map, and the radio and where each stands today.
Opening the sensing platform
The planned release separates the collection and observation tools from optional detection engines.
Release package prepared; public links pendingRead entry
Comparing recordings from different phones
A proposed calibration protocol asks how much device variation can be estimated without a reference microphone at every node.
Calibration proposal; field evaluation pendingRead entry
Building a record that can be replayed
The August prototype separates original evidence from later interpretation and records which components were implemented.
Architecture and prototype accountRead entry
Testing the framework in another community
The next research question is which observations from Buildspace remain useful across different settings.
Comparative research protocolRead entry
From an observation to an explanation
Four record levels help the Lab track how a measurement becomes a signal, a pattern, or a hypothesis.
Research-record frameworkRead entry
Research03
Research areas
Six areas, from the community-learning framework to observation design. Each is described on the research page.
DSL-001
The Digital Sidewalk
Entertainment-education through orality, sound, and cybernetic feedback in decentralized digital and physical communities.
DSL-002
Human resilience modeling
Frameworks linking acoustic environments, psychosocial systems, and community cybernetics to resilience outcomes.
DSL-003
Cybernetics and indirect learning
Pask’s Interaction of Actors Theory applied to transmedia programming and decentralized community infrastructure.
DSL-004
Transmedia narrative systems
Mass-media persuasion, film rhetoric, and narrative design as social-impact infrastructure for learning communities.
DSL-005
Civic and environmental sensing
Phone-based sensor networks, blind microphone calibration, observation schemas with explicit missingness, and open-core release. This is the Lab.
DSL-006
Observation design
Given evidence and competing hypotheses, which measurement is worth taking next. Validated on synthetic agents; shelved until a real ambiguity calls for it.
Publications04
Publications
Peer-reviewed papers, open-access preprints, datasets, and presentations, with the full ledger on the publications page.
2026
PreprintZenodo (open access, CC BY 4.0)
McDonough, D. B. · DOI 10.5281/zenodo.20131318
Digital Sidewalk Series. Submitted 15 May 2026.
2026
PreprintZenodo (open access, CC BY 4.0)
McDonough, D. B. · DOI 10.5281/zenodo.19722202
2026
PreprintZenodo (open access, CC BY 4.0)
McDonough, D. B. · DOI 10.5281/zenodo.19546204
Digital Sidewalk Lab Preprint Series DS/VA-001.
2026
DatasetDigital Sidewalk Lab (CC BY 4.0)
McDonough, D. B.
Collected January 24–25, 2026. Public release pending; CC BY 4.0 intended.
2025
Peer-reviewed paperIEEE Digital Education and MOOCs Conference
McDonough, D. B., & Brown, W. J. · DOI 10.1109/DEMOcon65705.2025.11282797
Lab05
Sensing platform: field-test console, sensor rig, dataset, and open-source release.
Field-test console
Layered weather map, camera wall with source health, community observation intake, and an advisory ticker. A research instrument, not an emergency service.
Open the console →
Clemson ice storm, January 2026
A two-device differential rig through a real ice storm. Working analysis reports 17.5 hours, a 10.8 hPa pressure drop, 82 flagged audio events, and a centroid shift toward 3,500–3,900 Hz during ice. Dataset collected; public release pending.
Read the record →
Open platform, pluggable detection
Sensor app, ingest, console, schema, and reference detector under Apache 2.0; dataset under CC BY 4.0, subject to the release files. The Lab’s own engine plugs in as a provider and is not required to run it.
The open-core boundary →Starlink constellation demo
Real-time visualization of 100 Starlink satellite positions, interference modeling, and fitness-based orbital optimization using D3 force simulation and React.
Launch demo →Connect06
Research inquiries, collaborations, and publication partnerships.
Contributor onboarding for the open-source platform begins with its public release.
Program status
2026: prototype development and field tests. 2027: public node program.
Field operators for the 2027 season will be able to run a phone or tablet as a sensor node using the open-source platform. Each step will be reported on this site when it is complete.