College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland, USA
Members of this tutorial group will bring design skills and knowledge from Interaction Design and HCI to analyze citizen science apps. We will role play citizen scientists and identify features that we like and those that we think can be improved. The group will work in small teams that will come together for group discussions and to prototype new designs or redesigns of all or parts of the apps. The tutorial will be highly interactive and everyone’s voice will be important for the success of the group as a whole.
My coauthored book “Interaction Design: Beyond HCI” claims that Interaction design uses HCI methods to design interactive products to support the way people communicate and interact in their everyday and working lives (Sharp, Rogers, Preece 2019). Citizen Science is the involvement of the public in scientific research, either driven by communities of by global investigations (citizenscience.org).
Citizen Science brings together citizens and scientists who work together to plan projects, collect and analyze data, and communicate their findings to the broader public and to the scientific community. Millions of people from across the world engage in thousands of citizen science projects on a range of topics that include: biodiversity, air and water quality, astronomy, biochemistry, geology, ecology, sustainable agriculture, climate change issues, history, genetics, health, and much more. Increasingly citizen science uses technology, particularly mobile apps, to leverage the effort of the citizens that use it. Much of this technology works well but some is designed by people with little HCI knowledge. Your HCI skills and experience can help to improve citizen science technology. At the same time you will learn about the rapidly growing field of citizen science. We will develop a research agenda that brings these two exciting fields closer together for the benefit of each of them.
Jennifer J. Preece is Professor and Dean Emerita at the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland, USA. She is a member of the University of Maryland Human-Computer Interaction Lab (HCIL) and Fellow of the ACM’s Special Interest Group on Computer Human Interaction (SIGCHI). Jennifer is Editor-in-Chief of the online journal Citizen Science: Theory and Practice and she is on the Board of Directors of Stanley Park Ecology Society (SPES). Jennifer’s research focuses on the use of technology in citizen and environmental science, human-computer interaction, online communities, and online participation and engagement. Jennifer has authored several books, including the co-authored book entitled Interaction Design: Beyond Human-Computer Interaction, 6th Edition, published by John Wiley & Sons, 2023.