Leveraging Digital Citizen Science for Research Problem Discovery: Insights from a Home Office Challenge Participatory

Abstract

Design-oriented research typically involves some kind of research problem discovery activity in order to identify and understand the problem space. Researchers can apply different methods to explore the problem space, for instance, interviews or focus groups. However, these methods are time consuming and do not scale well. Especially when it comes to discovering socially relevant realworld problems they require access to the general public to reach domain experts that is often difficult to achieve for researchers. Citizen science offers a promising approach for research problem discovery by actively involving citizens into the scientific inquiry to access knowledge on a large scale. In this paper, we report on a participatory action following a digital citizen science approach by specifically exploring the topic "home office" and corresponding challenges along four different subtopics. We report on (1) our approach and process to involve citizens in the problem discovery phase, (2) the implementation of the process in theweb-based digital citizen science application MyResearchChallenge to enable citizens to register, collect, discuss, and vote challenges, and (3) provide a summary on the collected challenges.