The PhD work aligns technological opportunities with self-selecting motivated participants, investigating their desire to monitor wildlife within their custody. It used an ethnographic and user- centred design approach with amateur beekeepers. The work built reciprocal interest in data which users could gather from self-assembled monitoring tools. This PhD explores the relationship between Open Design and Citizen Science, testing it ‘in-the-wild’ through the Bee Lab kit. The development of the kit and territory research was carried out in close collaboration with a local beekeeping community based in the South East of England. The work engaged with the British Beekeepers Association (BBKA), a Citizen Science stakeholder and technology provider Technology Will Save Us (TWSU), informing the project at each stage.
The PhD territory was highlighted in scoping design workshops with the public (Phillips. R, Baurley. S, Silve. S) and developed into: cultural probes deployed nationally investigating beekeepers’ ‘making’ activities (Phillips. R, Baurley. S, Silve. S 2013b), ethnographic studies identifying beekeepers’ product creations and re-appropriations for beekeeping praxis, participatory design workshops establishing lay users’ ‘technologically enabled conversations with bees’ (Phillips. R, Ford. Y, Sadler. K, Silve. S, Baurley. S 2013), technology kit assembly workshops testing kit design and competence of lay users (Phillips, Blum et al. 2014), and mental models of creating instructional content (Phillips, Robert., Lockton, Dan., Baurley, Sharon & Silve, Sarah 2013).
The Bee Lab Kit: activities engaging motivated lay users in the use of open technologies for CS activities Page 2 of 265
The creation of a repeatable Open Design / Citizen Science model based upon the live
testing from the Bee Lab project appendix (O)
Open Design Standards (paper pending publication) appendix (K)
The project worked with Citizen Science Vendors, Sussex Wildlife Trust and Cornell Laboratory of Ornithology, ascertaining the framing of Open Design/Citizen Science projects through a design toolkit. The design toolkit invention and testing was carried out with conservation organisations (Phillips, R & Baurley, S 2014) and technology kit deployment ‘in-the-wild’ with end users (Phillips, R., Blum, J., Brown, M. & Baurley, S 2014). Finally, the work identified the motivations of the individual stakeholders within the project.