Citizen Social Science: Two examples on how research can be collaborative, placed in public spaces and drive a social change

OpenSystems is a multidisciplinary group of the University of Barcelona that focuses on arts and public participation as core elements of the way of doing science. We work together with many actors and build tailored-made research collectives to address concerns and issues mostly grounded in urban contexts. Our methodology is based on community processes and we are committed to horizontal research through innovation and public engagement. Data science, complex systems science and social or socio-economic systems are our primary areas of expertise. We co-design collective and pop-up experiments to raise evidence to respond to societal challenges and to publicly discuss the results in a way which is valid for a wide range of actors. Our experimental setup is placed in the wild with situated, public and participatory experiments involving citizens at different levels. OpenSystems is fully committed with the emerging Citizen Science which includes amateurs and concerned citizens in research processes. Citizen science is scientific research conducted, in whole or in part, by amateur scientists. We present two examples (within StemForYouth EU project and with Games x Mental Health project) on how from Universitat de Barcelona we are running these participatory research processes which include more dimensions than those assumed to be necessary for successful and high-quality research. http://www.ub.edu/opensystems/