lytics, community engagement, and research methods. To connect science tightly to local concerns, we call for establishing CCS as a formal research field and integrating both computational and design thinking skills into curricula, which involves understanding local concerns through community fieldwork, forming the research question, co-designing technology infrastructure with communities, and evaluating the social impact after system deployment. In this way, we go beyond the mind-set of “citizens as scientists” to “scientists as citizens.” We envision that CCS can drive sustainable HCI toward citizen empowerment at a time when community concerns, sustainability issues, and technological ethics are at the forefront of global social discourse.

 

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Yen-Chia Hsu ( [e-mail]) is a Project Scientist at the Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.

Illah Nourbakhsh ( [e-mail]) is K&L Gates Professor of Ethics and Computational Technologies at The Robotics Institute, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA, USA.

Copyright held by authors.

domized experiment on two independent communities can be misleading.

Although it is difficult to statistically and rigorously validate the impact of systems on communities, understanding “How can the system be influential?” and “Does the community think that the system is influential?” can be beneficial. Through qualitative and quantitative analysis, the evaluation of impact can provide valuable insights to inform system design for the HCI community. For instance, our work, a community-empowered air-quality monitoring system (see the left image in the figure) enabled affected residents to present evidence of local air pollution for social activism, including smell reports, sensor data, and videos from monitoring cameras. 6 It studied how community members used animated smoke images and found that both manual and automatic approaches for generating images are essential during the engagement life cycle. The data provided by the system, combined with personal stories from affected residents, urged regulators to respond to the air pollution problem during a public community meeting.a Despite the small sample size in the analysis of self-efficacy and sense of community, the survey study found that the capability of using data-driven evidence from multiple perspectives is an important reason that the communities felt more confident after interacting with the system.

Our other work—Smell Pittsburgh (see https://smellpgh.org)—is a mobile application that enables residents to report pollution odors and track where these odors are frequently concentrated. 7 From our previous work, we found that smell experiences were valuable in representing how local air pollution affected the living quality of communities. In this Viewpoint, we translate this lesson from a hyperlocal to a citywide scale and provide insight into how smartphones, sensors, and statistical methods can be used to support CCS. The data analysis showed that events of poor smell were related to a joint a Regulators reviewing Shenango Coke Works’ compliance with 2012 consent decree: http://bit.ly/34TWZ9L

effect of wind information and hydrogen sulfide. A survey study found that motivations for community members to use Smell Pittsburgh came mainly from internal factors, including the desire to contribute data-driven evidence, concern about the welfare of others, and the ability to validate personal experiences using the visualization. This result was reinforced by the quantitative analysis of system usage, which identified a moderate association between contributing data and interacting with the visualization. The reports collected via Smell Pittsburgh were printed and presented by the community at the Board of Health meeting with the local health department, which urged the regulator to enact rigorous rules for petroleum coke plants.b

Next Steps

Community Citizen Science aims to empower everyday citizens and scientists to represent their voices, reveal local concerns, and shape more equitable power relationships. Lessons that are learned from hyperlocal scale projects may be translated to large scale ones. However, when conducting CCS research, it is essential to acknowledge that replicating successful experiences and “parachuting” technology intervention without thoughtful consideration can cause irreversible harm to communities. Developing interactive systems to support CCS requires training of multidisciplinary skills, including system development, interaction design, data ana- b Allegheny County Health Department defends air quality efforts, plans stricter coke plant rules: http://bit.ly/361wKQt

Lessons that are
learned from
hyperlocal-scale
projects may be
translated to
large-scale ones.