WORKSHOP: THE FUTURE OF CITIZEN SCIENCE
During the first semester of my MFA in Design thesis, I ran a workshop called "The Future of Citizen Science". In this workshop, we attempted to answer questions such as: What is the future of citizen science? What are the opportunities and challenges that the future holds for both scientists and the general public? How can students at the California College of the Arts work with scientists to solve problems and to popularize citizen science?
The workshop attendees were professional scientists, citizen scientists, and designers from the California College of the Arts.
The workshop attendees were professional scientists, citizen scientists, and designers from the California College of the Arts.
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In this workshop, I asked participants to think about these topics in the context of present times, consider what they might look like in ten years, think about how we might make those futures realities, and brainstorm about how designers might work with scientists to help us get to these ideal futures.
When considering how our discussion topics related to the present times, I asked participants to use STEEP as a lens to start with. STEEP is an acronym for Social, Technological, Economical, Environmental, and Political. The STEEP structure is used for scanning developments and is well known and used worldwide as a basis for external analysis. |
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When it was time for participants to imagine possible future scenarios for citizen science through these categories, they were asked to imagine a pessimistic scenario, an optimistic scenario, a transformative scenario, and a disaster scenario.
We then used backcasting to think about:
The workshop ended with some forecasting. I asked participants to think about how designers might work with environmental scientists to help us get to these ideal futures and avoid the less-desirable futures.
We then used backcasting to think about:
- What do we like that is coming out of these futures?
- What is the likelihood of each of these?
- What are trends that are already happening and pushing us towards or away from these futures?
- What are the correlating values of these resulting scenarios?
The workshop ended with some forecasting. I asked participants to think about how designers might work with environmental scientists to help us get to these ideal futures and avoid the less-desirable futures.
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