Collaborative Research Toolkit: a copyleft resource for the co-design of research processes
Enric Hidalgo, Dimmons Research Group, at IN3 - Open University of Catalonia // CECAN - University of Surrey
Boston 2017: Design and Planning
Apart from the paper we are presenting, 'Design thinking for the ideation of collaborative research processes: a comparative case study about the co-design of citizen science experiments' we would also like to organise a hands-on session where participants can test the material developed for the project. The 'ColMeth' toolkit consists in a series of canvas and additional offline artifacts that can help science teams and communities of interest to collaboratively: (1) brainstorm about concerns, issues and areas of interest for a research process; (2) select possibilities about specific topics, according to different criteria; (3) co-develop and discuss research questions and refine them; (4) generate diagrams and 'prototypes' of experiments and inquiry processes and (5) identify and coordinate specific tasks and needs related to the management of research. The toolkit has been already tested as a first version (in Catalan) for the co-design of citizen science experiments with different groups from secondary schools collaborating with a scientific team, as well as discussed in several seminars. For this session we would have an evolved version of the toolkit and also its first translation to English. The aim of the activity is twofold: on the one hand, to offer the resource as copyleft content (ready for adoption and experimentation) for practitioners and researchers interested in co-design and radical participation in scientific processes. On the other hand, to have the opportunity to keep improving the tool with feedback from experts in different fields and areas of knowledge,making it a more useful resource. Feedback gathered will also help to generate data for the meta research process associated to the toolkit, since the facilitator is using it as part of his PhD project about design thinking and agile practices for collaborative research. Early version of the toolkit: https://figshare.com/s/4e505cc4797d7d2b2e66. My blog site: http://www.backlogs.net/.
