Science of the City: from the street to the lab

Science of the City (scienceoftheciyt.net) is a four-year project organized by La Mandarina de Newton with the support of the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology. It engages citizens in finding the science in their... [ view full abstract ]

Science of the City (scienceoftheciyt.net) is a four-year project organized by La Mandarina de Newton with the support of the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology. It engages citizens in finding the science in their cities and to become actual scientists by proposing research questions, hypothesis, gathering evidence and performing experiments. It also invites them to use the web and audiovisual forms of expressions to communicate their interests and findings. We describe how the project has evolved from a participatory approach to a Responsible Research and Innovation project that eventually put into contact individual citizens with research groups. In this way, the research groups started new lines of research that were of interest to citizens. Conversely , citizens actually collaborated tightly with researchers and got a first hand experience in the process of research and science in general. We will show how the design approach we used in the preparation of the whole process has been the key to go beyond crowdsourding and into actual "communication by doing together" in the true spirit of citizen science.