lay perspectives contradict professional ones, and thus activism is needed to inform decision-makers about the perceptions of community concerns. In this way, CCS promotes ongoing political discourse around local concerns to improve the conditions of society. For instance, in a study of childhood leukemia cases that were clustered near contaminated water wells in Woburn, MA, residents recruited epidemiologists to show the relationship between the risk of childhood leukemia and the hazardous chemicals in their drinking water. 1 When connected to CCS, sustainable HCI is extended to exploring how technology can empower citizens to produce scientific evidence and rebalance power relationships among stakeholders.

Architecting Interactive Systems
as Technology Infrastructure

Designing interactive systems to sup-
port CCS suffers from the dilemma of
Wicked Problems. 10 These problems
have no precise definition, cannot
be fully observed at the beginning,
are unique and depend on context,
have no opportunities for trial and er-
ror, and have no optimal or provably
correct solutions. While researchers
intend to enable citizens to generate
scientific evidence and express their
concerns with interactive systems,
they are unable to accurately predict
if citizens will contribute sufficient
data to draw meaningful insights. It
is also difficult to determine the criti-
cal amount of human effort, time,
and the geographical scale required
spond to three different issues: core
value, participation model, and gov-
ernance structure. Depending on who
defines the research question, citizen
science projects can have different
scientific, educational, social, environ-
mental, and political values. 11 These
projects can make use of diverse partic-
ipation models between scientists and
citizens, ranging from crowdsourcing
to co-creation. 5 Citizen science can
also apply different governance struc-
tures to connect stakeholders, ranging
from top-down to bottom-up. 2

Participatory Democracy

CCS embraces participatory democracy to influence policymaking and address local concerns that community members wish to advocate for themselves. This community-oriented strand seeks to generate scientific evidence from community data to support exploration, understanding, and dissemination of local concerns. 8 In CCS, community members frame the main research question, and scientists engage in local issues that are raised by communities. For example, the Bucket Brigades project, pioneered by Global Community Monitor, (see https://gcmonitor.org) provides low-cost devices that enable affected residents to collect air samples, send these samples to laboratories for analysis, measure the impact of local industrial pollution, and launch advocacy efforts. When connected to CCS, sustainable HCI extends scientific research into community empowerment, exploring how to use technology to strengthen the link between science and civil society.

Community Co-Design

CCS embraces community co-design to develop interactive systems with advocacy groups, who are deeply grounded in local cultures and can bring diverse expertise to inform the design and use of computational tools. 3 In this way, CCS intends to rebalance technological privilege and develop a shared understanding of how technology is embodied in context, which brings community members and scientists into parity. Previous work has shown that a strong partnership among scientists and citizens has great potential to prompt decision making and produce policy changes. 11 For instance, The Community-Driven Environmental Project co-designed its technology platform, NatureNet, with naturalists and community members to successfully support local watershed management, such as engaging residents in installing rain barrels. 9 When connected to CCS, sustainable HCI further explores how researchers take on the role of supporters that facilitate utilizing and disseminating technology, instead of supervisors that oversee and control the entire community engagement procedure.

Power Rebalance

CCS aims to rebalance power by using a bottom-up and multiparty structure, where local communities play significant roles in initiating grassroots movements, providing organizational networking, and disseminating critical findings to influence policymaking. CCS is especially beneficial when

The left image (a) shows the user interface of our prior work, a community-empowered air-quality monitoring system. 6 The right image (b) shows the user interface of our other prior work, Smell Pittsburgh. 7

(a) (b)