About — Unit 01
About the Lab
Digital Sidewalk Lab is Unit 01 of Pip Projects, Inc. — the research, publication, and open sensing unit founded in 2024 by Darby Bailey McDonough, Ph.D.
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.
Three names, one root
- Digital Sidewalk Lab
- The unit, the brand, and the affiliation on every paper.
- The Digital Sidewalk
- The 2025 dissertation title. IEEE 2025 paper
- Digital Sidewalk
- The research framework as cited in papers. A method for decentralized digital communities.
The publication ledger.
Peer-reviewed papers, open-access preprints, datasets, presentations, and the patent family. Digital Sidewalk Lab is the research and publishing unit of Pip Projects, Inc.
Founded in late 2024 as a South Carolina unit of Pip Projects, Inc. The numbered sections above are the affiliation record as it has been published. What follows is how the Lab works.
What the Lab does
The Lab does four things, and this site is organized around them.
It publishes. Peer-reviewed papers, open-access preprints, datasets, and the journal on this site all carry the same affiliation line and the same evidence labels.
It observes. The Lab runs a civic and environmental sensing platform: a live field-test console, a phone-based sensor rig, and a published storm dataset, with an open-source release in preparation.
It builds method. Between the framework and the instruments sits a set of records, ledgers, and protocols that say what a claim is, where it may live, and what would refute it. Those are documented on the research page.
It keeps the record. Every research thread at the company passes through the Lab on its way to a paper or a release. The journal is the public trace of that passage, back to the dissertation.
Three names, one root
Three names share a root and are not interchangeable. Digital Sidewalk Lab is this unit and the affiliation on every paper. The Digital Sidewalk is the title of the 2025 dissertation. Digital Sidewalk, unqualified, is the research framework as cited in papers, a method for decentralized digital communities. The IEEE paper is on ResearchGate.
The founder
Darby Bailey McDonough holds a Ph.D. in Communication from Regent University (2025), an MBA, and a B.A. in Creative Writing from Antioch University Los Angeles. She has worked in voice and conversational systems for more than twenty-five years, beginning as employee number eighteen at Tellme Networks in 1999, where she co-designed voice-interface architecture and is a co-inventor on a family of United States patents assigned to Tellme Networks and Microsoft. She has managed more than eight million dollars in federal grants at prior institutions, led statewide data engineering for Utah state government, and coordinated voice-science research programs at the National Center for Voice and Speech. She is a member of IEEE. Her ORCID is 0000-0003-4072-6191.
How the Lab works with AI
The Lab uses AI systems as tools, and says so. Specifications, builds, and analyses produced with assistance are marked as such in the record, and the assistant's role is named. Judgments, claims, and errors are the Lab's. The journal entry on building with AI describes the editorial method, including what this edition does not contain.
Boundaries
The Lab's sensing console is a research instrument. It is not an emergency service, a rescue coordination tool, or a substitute for official weather information. The Lab does not publish detector internals, private source documents, or assistant transcripts. Government contract work performed by the parent company is not part of the Lab's public program.