DIY Science Lab

A solution by xHealth submitted to Collaborative Research

The services of DIY Science Lab will support collaborative DIY/DIWO (do-it-yourself /do-it-with-others) research and RRI with and for local society in Hungary in order to enhance social innovation towards sustainability and public health. The aim is the democratisation of innovation through putting open source-based sensing technology in the hands of communities.

(Pitched: 21/12/2017)

One Page Summary

Different local knowledge holders, practitioners of participatory research initiatives and researchers will gather in a DIY Research Lab events and form teams to identify social challenges/local needs together - in our words: “narrative development workshops” - in the field of public health and environmental sustainability. Following that we manage and organize the teams to develop ‘action design and prototyping experiments’ to overcome the problem through the narrative and guided by a Problem Owner. Series of communication events will be organised and an online platform will be set up to disseminate social narratives and the solution ideas as well as to share knowledge on DIY/DIWO research.

The ‘action design and prototyping experiments’ such as hackathons, design jams will be held in the venue of Makerspace.hu in Budapest. During these events, we will support and train the participants for gaining actionable knowledge and using data and technology for community purposes. The experiments will be tailored based on time, personal and community needs and the type of participants. The main features of the experiments are the following:
○ Motivate by narratives: Local narratives (sets of ideas, concepts, metaphors, discourses or story-lines about the local problems and required changes developed during the ‘narrative development workshops’) are used for framing the social challenges.
○ Apply co-creative and participatory approach: We intend to let people explore ideas collaboratively and make products in a short amount of time without having to deal with the everyday performance stress and boundaries. Local knowledge owners will be important players in the whole process.
○ Rely on different knowledge systems: We will invite designers, developers, technologists, early-stage researchers, coders, community developers, subject matter experts to participate using an open call for participants’ technique. Technology support will be provided by creative technologists and product designers who will be carefully selected for their technical ability and teaching skills. The mentors will be senior researchers, local community members, business and product development professionals as well as social innovation financers and accelerators.
○ Apply makers’ approach (designing and prototyping): We will coach, mentor and guide people to work with rapid prototyping (use open data portals, open-source Arduino-based human and environmental sensing kits, open hardware/software and creative commons) and to learn how to research, design and make digital products and to use service design tools such as gamification, community development and social business modelling.
○ Diversity in topics: We are going to focus on how ubiquitous sensing technologies are being used to engage the public in health and environmental monitoring (human sensing and environmental sensing) + citizen science.

Pitch video: https://youtu.be/GnCV-yA8Uxg