Seventeenth International Conference on Design Principles & Practices

Abstract

Citizen science as an inclusive approach for equal collaboration between people with different backgrounds and knowledge, needs to go beyond the contributory approach to collaborate in ways that are more deliberative and accessible. This paper proposes a ‘collective collaboration mapping’ framework for an inclusive citizen science approach based on touchpoints and co-creation methods to collectively create pathways for collaboration using intermediate-level knowledge. Intermediate-level knowledge concerns the uncertainties, imbalances, and alternatives within collaboration that are disclosed for reflection while the process unfolds itself. Moments of collective decisions, within an inclusive collaborative partnership, have a recursive character of evaluation referring to the first step in the process of people coming together and working on an issue for positive change. By effectuating the recursive character of the design process, ‘collective collaboration mapping’ operates as a reflective extension for creating paths in an inclusive citizen science approach to ensure flexible onboarding, equal collaboration, and synergy of knowledge. The ‘collective collaboration mapping’ framework is presented as a dialog tool based on touchpoints to generate a transdisciplinary process for inclusive innovation development, based on lessons learned from citizen science pilot studies in the health domain. The value of this explorative study is to move beyond user involvement towards ’knowledge commons’ based on co-creation methodologies and supported through design research.