Social Responses to Nature; Citizen Empowerment through Design

Traditionally, design content creation has remained within professional practice and manufacturing industries. Open Design (OD) utilizes accessible fabrication, enabling lay users to create and reappropriate content. Citizen Science encompasses activities where communities gather contextual environmental data for scientific or community purposes. The paradigm combination provides opportunities for communities, grass-roots projects and social initiatives with opportunities to create ‘products’ addressing personal and global issues. Social design (SD) combines OD/ Citizen Science practices, empowering responses by fostering ‘innovations that are both good for society and enhance society’s capacity to act’. This article highlights a SD case study that applied OD/Citizen Science to beekeeping. The ‘Bee Lab’ project empowered participants to construct data-gathering devices, embodying Manzini’s SD approach. The case study aided motivated participants to address local/global issues, facing Apis mellifera (the honey bee). The project yielded insights into motivation, community leveraging, public engagement for social good and more. Insights have been distilled into repeatable stages for analogous activities. The results offer applications for communities, design agents or organizations wishing to address the burgeoning challenges facing social responses to nature

e-NABLE: DIY-AT Production in a Multi-Stakeholder System

The e-NABLE community is a distributed collaborative volunteer effort to make upper-limb assistive technology devices available to end users. e-NABLE represents a do-it-yourself (DIY) approach to traditional prosthetic care. In order to learn about the attitudes and challenges of stakeholders working in and around e-NABLE, we conducted interviews with 12 volunteers in the e-NABLE movement and 3 clinicians. We found that volunteers derive a rich set of benefits from this form of altruistic activity; that both volunteers and clinicians recognize that end users benefit from aesthetic customization and personal choice in device selection; and that volunteers and clinicians bring separate, but potentially complementary, skills to bear on the processes of device provision. Based on these findings, we outline potential ways for volunteers and clinicians to optimize their talents and knowledge around the end goal of increased positive patient outcomes

Exploring Open Design for the application of Citizen Science; a toolkit methodology

The manufacture of mass produced quality assured products has previously remained within professional practice. Digital manufacture presents opportunities for producing products in low volumes, catering to bespoke requirements. This phenomenon can benefit parties where the manufacture of goods has previously been financially unobtainable, i.e. non-government and charitable organisations. Open hardware (accessible electronic components) can complement digital manufacture, enabling bespoke products to become intelligent, with the ability to sense, monitor, record and produce data. This paper tests an Open Design / Citizen Science toolkit drawing from practice based research and supporting ethnographic activities. The study documents design workshops with The Sussex Wildlife Trust and Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, conservation and wildlife experts. The papers research contribution is a design toolkit, identifying insightful opportunities for Open Design through Citizen Science. The study showcases new prospects for organisations to engage with the public. The prospects form ‘reciprocal relationships’ via members of the public fabricating monitoring devices and gathering data. Users’ individual accrued data can meet wider community needs and address local or national conservation challenges. The emphasis of this study has focused on accessible wildlife monitoring, beyond the valuable but limited versatility of the smartphone, extending Citizen Sciences reach

On Computational Notebooks to Empower Physical Computing Novices

The ever-increasing availability and variety of resources to create physical computing systems keep attracting electronics hobbyists and do-it-yourself enthusiasts. Nevertheless, the prototyping and development of these systems are still challenging to the novices. In this paper, we propose a tool (built on top of the Jupyter computational notebook) as a way for supporting step-by-step assisted learning and knowledge sharing. We extended the Jupyter notebook functionalities and implemented a custom-tailored kernel to seamlessly enable the interaction between the end-user web interface and the Arduino boards. We consider that this approach can effectively support physical computing novices in understanding, writing, and executing the code while empowering them to document and share the development steps they followed

Flowcuits: Crafting Tangible and Interactive Electrical Components with Liquid Metal Circuits

We present Flowcuits, a DIY fabrication method to prototype tangible, interactive and functional electrical components by manipulating liquid metal mechanisms. The generated prototypes afford both physical and visual interactions to demonstrate the inner working, underlying concepts and mechanics of fundamental electronic elements and circuits, which we propose as a method to support playful learning. The fabrication process follows simple imprinting and sealing of fluidic circuits with a 3D printed stamp on a commonly accessible and inexpensive moldable substrate such as 'blu tack'. Utilizing gallium-indium (Ga-In) liquid metal as the conductive element, we demonstrated our approach can create interactive and customizable electronic components such as switches, variable resistors, variable capacitors, logic gates and pressure sensors. In this paper, we present the design analogy of Flowcuits, DIY fabrication approach including a parametric 3D stamp design toolkit and results from a technical evaluation of the demonstrators. The stamps are printed with a low-cost 3D printer and all the materials are inexpensive and reusable, enabling Flowcuits to be easily used without any advance lab facilities

Guide to build YOLO, a creativity-stimulating robot for children

YOLO is a non-anthropomorphic social robot designed to stimulate creativity in children. This robot was envisioned to be used by children during free-play where they use the robot as a character for the stories they create. During play, YOLO makes use of creativity techniques that promote the creation of new story-lines. Therefore, the robot serves as a tool that has the potential to stimulate creativity in children during the interaction. Particularly, YOLO can stimulate divergent and convergent thinking for story creations. Additionally, YOLO can have different personalities, providing it with socially intelligent and engaging behaviors. This work provides open-source and open-access of YOLO's hardware. The design of the robot was guided by psychological theories and models on creativity, design research including user-centered design practices with children, and informed by expert working in the field of creativity. Specifically, we relied on established theories of personality to inform the social behavior of the robot, and on theories of creativity to design creativity stimulating behaviors. Our design decisions were then based on design fieldwork with children. The end product is a robot that communicates using non-verbal expressive modalities (lights and movements) equipped with sensors that detect the playful behaviors of children. YOLO has the potential to be used as a research tool for academic studies, and as a toy for the community to engage in personal fabrication. The overall bene t of this proposed hardware is that it is open-source, less expensive than existing ones, and one that children can build by themselves under expert supervision.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

The Bee Lab kit: activities engaging motivated lay users in the use of open technologies for citizen science activities

The PhD work aligns technological opportunities with self-selecting motivated participants, investigating their desire to monitor wildlife within their custody. It used an ethnographic and user- centred design approach with amateur beekeepers. The work built reciprocal interest in data which users could gather from self-assembled monitoring tools. This PhD explores the relationship between Open Design and Citizen Science, testing it ‘in-the-wild’ through the Bee Lab kit. The development of the kit and territory research was carried out in close collaboration with a local beekeeping community based in the South East of England. The work engaged with the British Beekeepers Association (BBKA), a Citizen Science stakeholder and technology provider Technology Will Save Us (TWSU), informing the project at each stage. The PhD territory was highlighted in scoping design workshops with the public (Phillips. R, Baurley. S, Silve. S) and developed into: cultural probes deployed nationally investigating beekeepers’ ‘making’ activities (Phillips. R, Baurley. S, Silve. S 2013b), ethnographic studies identifying beekeepers’ product creations and re-appropriations for beekeeping praxis, participatory design workshops establishing lay users’ ‘technologically enabled conversations with bees’ (Phillips. R, Ford. Y, Sadler. K, Silve. S, Baurley. S 2013), technology kit assembly workshops testing kit design and competence of lay users (Phillips, Blum et al. 2014), and mental models of creating instructional content (Phillips, Robert., Lockton, Dan., Baurley, Sharon & Silve, Sarah 2013). The Bee Lab Kit: activities engaging motivated lay users in the use of open technologies for CS activities Page 2 of 265 The creation of a repeatable Open Design / Citizen Science model based upon the live testing from the Bee Lab project appendix (O) Open Design Standards (paper pending publication) appendix (K) The project worked with Citizen Science Vendors, Sussex Wildlife Trust and Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, ascertaining the framing of Open Design/Citizen Science projects through a design toolkit. The design toolkit invention and testing was carried out with conservation organisations (Phillips, R & Baurley, S 2014) and technology kit deployment ‘in-the-wild’ with end users (Phillips, R., Blum, J., Brown, M. & Baurley, S 2014). Finally, the work identified the motivations of the individual stakeholders within the project

Designed in Shenzhen: Shanzhai Manufacturing and Maker Entrepreneurs

We draw from long-term research in Shenzhen, a manufacturing hub in the South of China, to critically examine the role of participation in the contemporary discourse around maker culture. In lowering the barriers of technological production, “making” is being envisioned as a new site of entrepreneurship, economic growth and innovation. Our research shows how the city of Shenzhen is figuring as a key site in implementing this vision. In this paper, we explore the “making of Shenzhen” as the “Silicon Valley for hardware.” We examine, in particular, how maker-entrepreneurs are drawn to processes of design and open sharing central to the manufacturing culture of Shenzhen, challenging conceptual binaries of design as a creative process versus manufacturing as its numb execution. Drawing from the legacy of participatory design and critical computing, the paper examines the social, material, and economic conditions that underlie the growing relationship between contemporary maker culture and the concomitant remake of Shenzhen.