D•VERSE (Detroit Integrated Vision for Environmental Research through Science and Engagement) is a multidisciplinary research team uses community-based participatory research to develop effective approaches for scientists and communities to work together in addressing urban environmental problems.
I am involved with two projects as a member of D•VERSE. One is on the environmental and health effects of storing petroleum (pet) coke in a southwest Detroit neighborhood (2014; 2-year $150,000 CURES grant). In this project, the team is engaging the community to discover its concerns about pet coke. Those concerns will then drive the research focus of the team and be the basis for my development of communication materials enabling residents to participate in the project as “citizen scientists.” I and four other members presented our work on the project at the 2015 NIH Science of Team Science conference in Washington, D.C; I designed the presentation and the diagrams explaining our research process.
The second project is about asthma in Detroit teens (2015; 1.5-year $75,000 INPHAASE grant). Teens will monitor the air around them and keep an asthma symptom diary for two weeks. After an analysis of the air particles and an assessment of their diaries, I will be working with a cohort of the teens to brainstorm ideas for a digital symptom diary based on their experiences. I designed one of the three symptom diaries that will be used and tested. User-centered design and community-based participatory research are central to the objectives and structure of each project. Their interaction in the projects is the topic of a paper and conference proceedings publication, “Transdisciplinarity, Community-based Participatory Research, and User-based Design: The D•VERSE Group and Two Projects,” for the international Human Computer Interface 2016: 5th International Conference on Design, User Experience and Usability (session on Information Design and User Experience), Toronto, Canada, in July 2016. I am lead author. I have also designed the visual identity for D•VERSE that emphasizes the variety of researchers and people with whom we work in Detroit (or “the D” as it is also called) and its website header that animates our research foci. http://www.dverse.wayne.edu/
Other Items
Brochures
Scientific Diagrams and Visualization of Information
