For full text search please use the '?' prefix. e.g. ? Onboarding

Citizen Design

This note is about a proposed extension of citizen science tools to contribute to one design, interspecies design, and more-than-human civic action.

Relevant Terms and Concepts

Citizen Design Framing

  • citizen science
  • citizen design
  • action-oriented citizen science
  • interventionist citizen science
  • translational citizen science
  • from sensing to making

Design and Participation

DIY and Democratisation of Technology

  • DIY
  • DIY culture
  • maker movement
  • frugal innovation
  • open-source
  • open design
  • democratisation of technology
  • technology appropriation and reinterpretation
  • user innovation
  • repair culture
  • lead users
  • peer production

Knowledge Externalisation and Tooling

  • externalising expert knowledge into tools
  • codification of tacit knowledge
  • scaffolded participation
  • constraints as enablers
  • boundary objects
  • decision support tools

Local Adaptation and Diffusion

  • place-based innovation
  • local customisation
  • local adaptation
  • situated design
  • context-sensitive design
  • innovation and place-based adoption
  • scaling up
  • scaling out
  • scaling deep

Learning, Solidarity, and Memory

Theory Sources

  • science and technology studies (STS)
  • social construction of technology (SCOT)
  • actor-network theory (ANT)
  • capability approach
  • transition design
  • strategic niche management
  • responsible research and innovation (RRI)
  • participatory governance

Definition

Working definition: citizen design is an action-oriented extension of citizen science in which communities do not only collect and interpret data, but also co-create situated interventions, tools, and governance arrangements with attention to more-than-human agency.

Shorter formula: from citizen science as distributed sensing to citizen design as distributed more-than-human intervention.

Innovation

The term "citizen design" overlaps with participatory design, civic design, and community design. The innovation is not the label, but the synthesis and operational direction.

Citizen design is a civic implementation for all-life, interspecies, multispecies, and nonhuman-led design work. One design sets the ambition that all stakeholders can "have a say and a go" without turning this into top-down universalism. interspecies design and multispecies design supply the all-life commitments. participatory design supplies co-design, agonism, democratic innovation, and infrastructuring. Open Design and DIY supply toolkits, repair, adaptation, making, and local technical capability. design as externalisation (Private) frames tools, constraints, prompts, protocols, templates, indicators, and shared memory as redistributed expertise. nonhuman-led futures offers a possible method for interpreting nonhuman proposals and making them visible, contestable, and actionable.

Distinctive moves:

  • from citizen data contribution to citizen design agency;
  • from expert ecological design to locally maintained design capacity;
  • from research-led more-than-human design to civic more-than-human design;
  • from design toolkits as files or recipes to design toolkits as scaffolds for situated judgement;
  • from one-off participation to community and organisational learning over time;
  • from human consultation to more-than-human evaluation through evidence of use, refusal, adaptation, thriving, decline, and maintenance burden.

The approach differs from neighbouring terms because it combines intervention, making, maintenance, nonhuman agency, place-based adoption, and ecological accountability. This makes it more inclusive and actionable for the goals such as thriving and justice than citizen science, participatory design, open design, social innovation, or public-interest design on their own.

Need

Citizen science has matured as a mode of distributed knowledge production, but many projects still stop at monitoring, reporting, or awareness. Current social-ecological crises require methods that move from sensing to making, from diagnosis to intervention, and from expert-only planning to locally governed design action.12 A citizen design framing responds to this gap by linking democratisation of technology with practical capability building, local adaptation, and justice-oriented participation in decisions that affect human and nonhuman communities.

Open Challenges

  • epistemic: translating nonhuman agency into design evidence without reducing it to human proxies remains difficult.
  • methodological: many participatory projects document process quality, but provide uneven evidence about long-term ecological and organisational outcomes.
  • political: local co-design can reproduce inequalities unless projects include explicit justice criteria and accountability.
  • authorship: citizen design must avoid claiming that humans fully represent nonhumans.
  • scaling: what scales may be patterns, protocols, and evaluation habits, not final designs.
  • expertise: toolkits can democratise knowledge, but they can also hide expert assumptions.

Working Research Questions

  • What changes when citizen science platforms support design action, not only observation?
  • How can nonhuman agency shape local design choices beyond symbolic actions and human projection?
  • What forms of knowledge can be externalised into tools and constraints without producing rigid recipes?
  • How can citizen design record community memory, failed trials, maintenance burdens, and nonhuman uptake over time?
  • What governance models can let communities revise designs as feedback arrives?
  • What counts as success when humans, nonhumans, institutions, and infrastructures evaluate outcomes differently?

References

Björgvinsson, Erling, Pelle Ehn, and Per-Anders Hillgren. "Design Things and Design Thinking: Contemporary Participatory Design Challenges." Design Issues 28, no. 3 (2012): 101–16. https://doi.org/10.1162/desi_a_00165.

Björgvinsson, Erling, Pelle Ehn, Per-Anders Hillgren, and Toni Robertson. "Participatory Design and 'Democratizing Innovation.'" In Proceedings of the 11th Biennial Participatory Design Conference, edited by Toni Robertson, 41–50. Sydney: ACM, 2010. https://doi.org/10.1145/1900441.1900448.

Bonney, Rick, Caren B. Cooper, Janis Dickinson, Steve Kelling, Tina Phillips, Kenneth V. Rosenberg, and Jennifer Shirk. "Citizen Science: A Developing Tool for Expanding Science Knowledge and Scientific Literacy." BioScience 59, no. 11 (2009): 977–84. https://doi.org/10.1525/bio.2009.59.11.9.

Costanza-Chock, Sasha. Design Justice: Community-Led Practices to Build the Worlds We Need. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2020. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/12255.001.0001.

Kullenberg, Christopher, and Dick Kasperowski. "What Is Citizen Science? A Scientometric Meta-Analysis." PLOS One 11, no. 1 (2016): e0147152. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0147152.

Manzini, Ezio. Design, When Everybody Designs: An Introduction to Design for Social Innovation. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2015. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9873.001.0001.

Footnotes

  1. Phillips, Robert, Sharon Baurley, and Sarah Silve. "Citizen Science and Open Design: Workshop Findings." Design Issues 30, no. 4 (2014): 52–66. https://doi.org/10.1162/desi_a_00296.˄

  2. Roudavski, Stanislav. "Multispecies Cohabitation and Future Design." In Proceedings of Design Research Society (DRS) 2020 International Conference: Synergy, edited by Stella Boess, Ming Cheung, and Rebecca Cain, 731–50. London: Design Research Society, 2020. https://doi.org/10.21606/drs.2020.402.˄

Backlinks