Citizen science can be a powerful approach to foster the successful implementation of technological innovations in health, care or well-being. Involving experience experts as co-researchers or co-designers of technological innovations facilitates mutual learning, community building, and empowerment. By utilizing the expert knowledge of the intended users, innovations have a better chance to get adopted and solve complex health-related problems. As citizen science is still a relatively new practice for health and well-being, little is known about effective methods and guidelines for successful collaboration. This scoping review aims to provide insight in (1) the levels of citizen involvement in current research on technological innovations for health, care or well-being, (2) the used participatory methodologies, and (3) lesson’s learned by the researchers. A scoping review was conducted and reported in accordance with the PRISMA-ScR guidelines. The search was performed in SCOPUS in January 2021 and included peer-reviewed journal and conference papers published between 2016 and 2020. The final selection (N = 83) was limited to empirical studies that had a clear focus on technological innovations for health, care or well-being and involved citizens at the level of collaboration or higher. Our results show a growing interest in citizens science as an inclusive research approach. Citizens are predominantly involved in the design phase of innovations and less in the preparation, data-analyses or reporting phase. Eight records had citizens in the lead in one of the research phases. Researcher use different terms to describe their methodological approach including participatory design, co-design, community based participatory research, co-creation, public and patient involvement, partcipatory action research, user-centred design and citizen science. Our selection of cases shows that succesful citizen science projects develop a structural and longitudinal partnership with their collaborators, use a situated and adaptive research approach, and have researchers that are willing to abandon traditional power dynamics and engage in a mutual learning experience.
MULTIFILE
This open access book presents a selection of the best contributions to the Digital Cities 9 Workshop held in Limerick in 2015, combining a number of the latest academic insights into new collaborative modes of city making that are firmly rooted in empirical findings about the actual practices of citizens, designers and policy makers. It explores the affordances of new media technologies for empowering citizens in the process of city making, relating examples of bottom-up or participatory practices to reflections about the changing roles of professional practitioners in the processes, as well as issues of governance and institutional policymaking.
This work explores the potential of doing collaborative data physicalization for discussing (un)sustainable practices. For this purpose, it draws on experiences from several data physicalization workshops during the period of 2018-2022, conducted in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, which were available to mostly inexpert groups of people, including almost a hundred primary school students. This paper particularly focuses on a recent held dataphys workshop with over 20 adult participants, such as including international students and climate activists. Based on learner reports (self-assessment questionnaires) (N=20), and observations, it was found that the process of making data physicalizations in workshop and educational settings can be beneficial for engaging in collaborative creative and critical discussion of (un)sustainable practices. Particularly, the participants positively indicated to have learned from the dataphys workshop on a 5-point Likert scale and agreed that it enabled (1) critical thinking, (2) data understanding, (3) creativity, (4) collaboration, and (5) awareness of (un)sustainable practices. This paper presents the workshop format, including ingredients such as live cartoon capturing, and challenges in realizing such value in the context of sustainability, such as including a wider public, the conscious use of data and materials, and discussable effective outcomes.
