Wear and aware: Citizens, sensors, and data to design inclusive research processes

The practice of involving citizens or non-expert actors in a research process has become increasingly important in the last decade, both with regard to scientific research activities and in design research processes (Devisch et al., 2018). Ac- cording to this trend, the practice of Citizen Science (CS) – involving citizens in a scientific research process – has seen an increasing popularity from the academic perspective and increasingly from public institutions such as the Europe- an Commission.1 The European Commission’s Green Paper (2014): Citizen Science for Europe: Towards a better society of responsible citizens and empowered research forcefully express- es the argument in terms of a paradigm shift towards a more open research process, by emphasizing that “new participa- tory processes and networking promote the transformation of the scientific system, enabling collective intelligence and the creation of new collaborative knowledge, democratising research and leading to the emergence of new disciplines and connections.” The involvement of citizens in a design research process through participation in conceptualizing, conducting, ana- lysing, interpreting and defining the implications of services and products could be carried out through different means. Those means may require an active involvement of citizens or may be achieved through a passive (and sometimes uncon- scious) involvement of participants (as, for example, in the case of gathering data through web or social network activ- ities) (Ciuccarelli et al., 2014). In this paper we will focus on processes which actively involve citizens and humans in general that participate in the citizen science processes us- ing wearable devices, with a special focus on urban contexts. This paper will address the following questions: How citizen science processes can increase their inclusivity through the segmentation of targets? How could citizens act as activators of data gathering about an urban context using wearable de- vices? How could devices and sensors be designed in a more effective way?