Designing Tools for Citizen Science
Check out the paper, Designing for Doubt, that argues sensor-rich mobile phones can be used to design personal measurement instruments that will enable a powerful new wave of citizen science. Citizen science or “street science” involves the public in the collection and analysis of data to conduct large-scale professional grade scientific work. With web-based crowdsoucring platforms it has seen considerable growth. Add to that souped-up cell phones and you might change the game in how some of modern science is done.
Designing such tools and platforms presents many challenges for the cognitive designer. Chief among them is to insure the appropriate mental discipline when forming a hypothesis, collecting data, analyzing data and conducting other scientific activities by non-scientifically trained yet highly motivated citizens.
