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)