Take a look around your city. There’s the old man walking his dog, the flocks of pigeons on the roof, and the constant honk of cars rushing by the smeared windowpanes. But these images and sounds are more than fleeting. This is all data.

Data from taxis in New York, data from cell phone conversations in Brazil, data from trash collectors in Spain. Lines and lines of unending data are created every day, every second, by people going about their lives, including you. 2008 was the first time in the history of civilization that 50 percent of the people on earth lived in what is classified as an urban area. It’s not all data from companies or government entities either. It’s data from the average, plugged-in person, like his rants about traffic on Twitter or her images of potholes on Instagram.

The question is, what does this data mean? What can it do? Given a little exercise, a little insight, and a dash of design, the SENSEable City Lab at MIT hopes to explain. They want to use that data to turn a mere “city” into a “smart city.”

A city is like a clock, filled with interlocking parts that are dynamic and changeable but governed by the complex mechanics whirring just beneath the surface. Pry open the back and the inner contents are revealed, a mess of information from each user in the city.

But a smart city is different, a smart city understands relativity. It understands experiences differ for each person depending on how they move about and what civic processes take place. For example, an average city is loud. But a smart city understands its soundscapes and is able to track where noise pollution is most prevalent and where it should be prevented. By understanding the mechanics of how a city operates and how its residents use the metropolis, the lab hopes to help the city administration, future architects, and the public, build a “digital nervous system”—a city that can interpret actions and respond with its own.

For a lab obsessed with efficiency, the offices of the SENSEable City at MIT are a mess. Prototypes of mobile apps hang on bare walls with an assortment of wheeled and non-wheeled chairs surrounding desks at unexpected perpendicular angles. On every flat surface lie spare computer monitors or silver Macbooks, Apple logos glowing under masses of recycled paper.

The lab takes a city’s data and turns it into usable civic projects. Why wait for a taxi when a citizen driver is willing to pick you up? What are the political implications of phone calls being made across factious country borders? How often does trash need to be picked up in an urban area? It’s all in the data. And soon, in the average person’s hand, thanks to the explosion of the lab’s mobile applications.

I decide to turn the tables and collect my own data on the lab. On any given day, there are five to fifteen people crammed into each of the four major office spaces. Founded in 2004 by Carlo Ratti in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning, the lab lives on money from a consortium—a group of governments, academics, and businesses. The consortium funds project prototypes (currently over fifty) produced by the data crunching. Their promotional book summarizes the work as “a multidisciplinary research group that studies the interface between cities, people, and technologies.” What this translates to is a lot of data collection and visual interpretations of the results through coding.

As I quickly learn, watching someone code a program is like watching paint dry. Or, it would be, if during the process paint chunks were known to abruptly fall on the floor, get scooped up, and re-thrown against the wall. While some lumps stick, some are destined to fall again, forever irritating the artist. (The person I choose to watch grumbles as the lines of code refuse to create beautiful shapes.)

Coding is a lesson in evolution, learning what works and what doesn’t and tossing jumbles of commands into the program until it looks just right. And it always does. The end product, as I peer over their shoulders, is beautiful. Functional. So accessible and understandable that like the painted wall, the outcome can be leaned against without once wondering about the mastermind behind it. I watch in awe as data from 311 calls in New York City become a visual interpretation of what types of complaints are most prevalent in the boroughs. A blur of blocky colors representing call types is overlaid on a blacked out, traditional New York City map. It illuminates instantly that, while noise is a problem in Manhattan, the Bronx is more likely to complain about graffiti. Such an image elegantly reveals what the data is saying and like the wall, appreciation for the sweat and tears behind it dissolves with each use.

The data crunchers are a uniquely disparate and international bunch. Over sandwich baguettes, I listen to speakers from Europe, South America, and Asia discuss their work and how projects like the Copenhagen Wheel, which converts a normal bicycle into a hybrid e-bike, are transforming how people use cities. Another: Trash Talk, a project that tagged trash and followed its route through garbage pick-ups in Seattle, helped city government answer questions of how efficient pick-up routes were and if recyclables were really being recycled.

Mixed media by design, many of the people who work in the lab have eclectic backgrounds: computer science and art; math and data visualizations; architecture and engineering. The combinations are surprising. They don’t look like MIT students either, though I blame this mostly on the European flair I detect in their outfits.

What they don’t say and what I begin to wonder: are we worried about how much of our data is publicly available? Google has found itself in a complicated mess after its self-driving car illegally picked up data from home wireless networks as it roamed the city streets. Whether swiping a CharlieCard at a Boston T station or buying a coffee at Starbucks, we keep creating new streams to join the unending ocean of information about our lives. To live on data now is to feast from a buffet. While impossible to know if the pendulum will swing the other way as we realize the tradeoffs of a private life, the SENSEable City lab will continue to delight in the gluttony we’ve created.