Category: transdisciplinarity

New article – Participatory design of citizen science experiments

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This article describes and analyzes the collaborative design of a citizen science research project through cocreation. Three groups of secondary school students and a team of scientists conceived three experiments on human behavior and social capital in urban and public spaces. The study goal is to address how interdisciplinary work and attention to social concerns and needs, as well as the collective construction of research questions, can be integrated into scientific research. The 95 students participating in the project answered a survey to evaluate their perception about the dynamics and tools used in the cocreation process of each experiment, and […]

The same genealogical tree of Agile and action research

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What’s the connection between Agile and action research principles? This blog post focuses on the relatively unknown relationship between principles of Agile for team-based project development and the long and dense tradition of action research. It’s based on a series of readings, practices and observations during my PhD about Agile and co-design for collaborative research processes (with support from Dimmons and a CECAN Fellowship), where I try to describe in parallel to case studies and paper writing some of the relevant findings and reflections I find. Action research implies a highly participatory and iterative approach to the concept of research, […]

Testing new materials and dynamics for co-created projects

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Last week was very active for Dimmons with our participation facilitating different workshops, where we had the opportunity to advance in a first version of a platform cooperativism toolkit. Following our collaboration with La Comunificadora, the incubation project of commons collaborative economy initiatives promoted by Barcelona Activa and coordinated by the Free Knowledge Institute, we organized a co-creation session around the LliureTIC project. In that case we prepared a dynamic and materials to identify and discuss among different actors and organizations of the free/libre software sector in Barcelona experiences of products and services, as well as common needs that a collective entity around them could help […]

“Rethinking Research” unconference at Coventry University

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This week I participated in the unconference Rethinking Research (Disrupting and Challenging Research Practices) organized by the Center for Research Capability and Development at Coventry University. Inspired by publications such as The Slow Professor (Berg and Seeber, 2016), The Academic Book of the Future (Lyons and Rayner, 2016), or Creativity and the Knowledge Economy (Peters and Marginson, 2008), the meeting proposed an intense one-day program in which to rethink the role of researchers, new dynamics of generating and sharing knowledge and working in academic institutions. There I facilitated a session on Agile adoption for research processes, around my PhD project, based on case analysis and interviews around working groups in CECAN, Dimmons and […]

Agile beyond software development, some cases of adoption in research

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Can Agile contribute to collaboration and shared management of research, evaluation and other science-related projects? In this first blog post about a series of questions around such possibility, I focus on existing case studies and some of the learnings, issues and potential benefits derived from the appropriation of Agile for research practices. (This post is based on an extensive literature review and ongoing case study for my PhD project, with support from Dimmons and a CECAN Fellowship). Let’s start with a definition: Agile (here’s the Wikipedia article) is a set of practices, values and principles for software development based on […]

Guía de uso del toolkit de co-diseño de investigación (versión 1.3)

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Durante el primer año de doctorando, a parte de una inmersión importante en la literatura sobre diseño de investigaciones, aprendizaje organizacional, gestión de proyectos de investigación, y un largo etcétera de áreas de conocimiento y autores de referencia relacionados (aquí el mapa dinámico), me dediqué a confeccionar un material de facilitación o toolkit. Surgió de la necesidad de traducir en una secuencia coherente los aprendizajes  de investigación-acción del día a día de Dimmons, y especialmente la reflexión sobre mi rol de facilitador en el pasado y cómo imaginaba dinámicas de co-creación en el contexto académico (y sus fronteras permeables con […]

Co-design of citizen-science experiments: slides and toolkit v1.3

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Below the slides for my presentation at the 2017 Annual Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) in Boston, where I had the opportunity to discuss the work I did with Josep Perelló, Isabelle Bonhoure and the rest of the OpenSystemsBCN team co-designing citizen science experiments. I’m also happy to share that a longer version of the analysis of this case study of my PhD project is going to be published in January 2018 at the prestigious Comunicar Journal. Also, while the Research co-design toolkit keeps evolving in parallel (soon to be translated to Polish and Greek under the […]

Co-designing citizen science for STEM4youth project

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Under the umbrella of the European project STEM4youth for engaging teenagers with citizen science, I recently had the opportunity of collaborating for a series of case studies with the OpenSystems group leaded by Josep Perelló at the University of Barcelona. We organised a series of co-design sessions of experiments about human behaviour with three diverse groups of students from different secondary schools (totalling more than 100 participants as “amateur researchers”).  The basic premise of the process was to start in the same way in all cases: rather than only involving students in the data gathering process (which is the usual approach […]

First phase of field research

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This January I just started the fieldwork for my PhD project, which in this case means (apart from some interviews and analysis of materials) to combine the role of co-creation facilitator with direct observation, and other ways of gathering relevant data about the adoption of co-design and agile for collaborative research. For this, the calendar of several research processes are just starting and the people behind them coordinating with me in order to have specific sessions for the collaborative definitions of what to develop as collaborative enquiry and how. This coincides, in all cases, with a previous agreement that based […]

ColMeth: Personal overview of a PhD “research on research” after year #1

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After nearly one year of intense documentation and exploration for the first stage of my PhD project, which started in February 2016, right now just before entering in the “fieldwork phase”, it seems a good moment to take a look at some of my notes, findings and thoughts around the process. And also how I have been experiencing this intellectual effort and challenge at the personal level. First of all, let’s clarify that I knew in advance it was going to be hard, time-consuming and engrossing, after two other attempts to start such academic journey in different periods of my […]