Research

I started out by investigating the concept of ‘citizen science’; which is the participation of the public in scientific research.. Through utilising the collective strength of communities, scientists are able to attain results from a wider area. It also helps people to get in touch with local environments and encourages them to learn more about the creatures which inhabit them. I wanted to provide a way for these two groups to better interact and collaborate with each other, so I began looking into a way in which I could design for these audiences.

I found some articles on this particular topic, and this one by Rotman et al discusses what sort of technical and social infrastructures are required when designing for scientists and citizens in order to promote engagement and collaboration. Reading through this, I realised that it is important to cater to two groups of people; the scientists and the citizens. I wanted my app design to serve as a sort of social platform that would connect the two. It would therefore be a community driven app, so I needed a way to provide an incentive for people to keep returning to it. In other words, I needed to make it fun and engaging to a wide range of audience.

To surmise the article:

Goals of professional scientists:

- Want to advance science

- Further their own professional careers

Goals of citizens:

- Interest and curiosity

- Commitment to conservation and educational efforts

Throughout the course citizen science projects, these goals remain the same, but the motivation of the citizens change over time, particularly at the start of the project and towards the end of the project. Towards the end of the project is the point at which volunteers decide whether they want to continue and help in future projects, so it is important to keep engagement levels high at this point.

https://doi.org/10.1145/2145204.2145238

Some excerpts I found interesting:

"Volunteers believed collaboration with scientists would benefit the volunteer community more than scientists believed it would benefit themselves (i.e., the scientific community), but also that scientists valued collectivism less than other motivational factors. Specifically, altruism and principlism, were deemed most important by scientists, reflecting the notion that science is made to benefit the greater good.

Initial interest – Volunteers’ initial interest in citizen science projects stemmed from many elements, all related to egoism: (1) familiarity with- or personal curiosity abouta specific species (“I’m one of those arachnoids geeks”), a landscape, or environment, or a process (“I see a lot of insects interacting with the plants and, to understand plants better, I need to know what those insects are”); (2) previous engagement in scientific projects, in schools or as a hobby;
(3) an existing hobby that is closely related to citizen science (e.g., photography); or (4) a career building step for aspiring scientists (e.g., “[my motivation is] gaining the experience and seeing what it is, maybe having something for my resume”).

“Quality assurance” and “quality control” were two of the most recurrent themes in scientists’ accounts. They stressed the need to get as much information as possible about the volunteers’ expertise, participation in previous projects, level of training, and level of commitment, as preliminary requirements in order to deflect unwanted volunteers from joining their projects. This was also their way of ensuring that only “good” data will be delivered by volunteers."

Dana Rotman, Jenny Preece, Jen Hammock, Kezee Procita, Derek Hansen, Cynthia Parr, Darcy Lewis, and David Jacobs. 2012. Dynamic changes in motivation in collaborative citizen-science projects. In Proceedings of the ACM 2012 conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '12). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 217–226. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/2145204.2145238

Final Major Project This page is part of the collection 'IVM YR 03 Haniya Nadeem Group 7'.

Confirm copying