Transdisciplinarity, Community-Based Participatory Research, and User-Based Information Design Research The D.VERSE Group and Two Projects

This paper will discuss how the confluence between community-based participatory research and user-based information design is an effective approach to researching science in the public interest as seen through their application to the conceptual and methodological frameworks of two projects by the transdisciplinary research team D.VERSE (Detroit Integrated Vision for Environmental Research through Science and Engagement). D.VERSE, an example of team science, tackles complex scientific issues with community residents working as citizen scientists. One project assesses the health and environmental effects on residents of the southwest Detroit community of storing open piles of petcoke (a by-product of the shale oil fracking process) on the Detroit River; the second project focuses on the impact of air quality on asthmatic Detroit teenagers. This paper will also suggest a set of guidelines that other researchers might use to create research clusters similar to D-VERSE.