Exploring conditions for designing citizen observatories in Sri Lanka: the case of air quality in rural areas

Citizen observatories (COs) are socio-technical initiatives that seek to engage citizens interested in environmental issues via digital applications to gather ecological data, drawing on participatory approaches. While CO projects conducted in higher-income countries have successfully engaged citizens, less is known about how they engage with citizens in rural areas in lower-income countries. Herein, the authors address this knowledge gap by exploring conditions for designing COs in rural areas in Sri Lanka. They conducted a case study to examine how rural communities that reside close to industrial centres make sense of their surroundings, with a specific focus on air quality. With the aid of qualitative analysis of 10 semi-structured interviews, they identify primary collective community practices that contribute to local air quality knowledge.

The study contributes to discourses on conditions for designing COs by suggesting potential design features for community science participation and sense-making. Their findings indicate that most often, the citizen science practices identified and discussed by the literature on COs and human-computer interaction are at odds with rural communities’ priorities and sensing praxis in countries such as Sri Lanka. Thus, they argue for engaging with communities and their specific collective practices rather than with individuals to design COs in rural areas in Sri Lanka and in similar contexts. To give socio-technical initiatives such as COs a chance outside of higher-income countries, attention must be paid to how citizens experience, sense, and make sense of the local environment as part of a collective effort.