Co Creation

ORION, a new Horizon 2020 project, got off to a flying start at the first meeting of the project team in May. Thirty-two representatives from nine partner organisations, the project Advisory Board, and the EC Project Officer spent two productive and collaborative days at the headquarters of the project co-ordinator, the Centre for Genomic Regulation, in Barcelona.

Fifteen representatives from the research community, business sector, policy makers and civil society organisations, gathered in Brussels in April to co-design a new call for co-creation activities within the ORION project. The goal of the interactive workshop was to generate ideas on what the new funding call would look like, what types of projects to fund and who could participate. The new ORION co-creation call will be launched in June.

We are currently in the process of calling 6000 people in Czech Republic, Germany, Italy, Spain, Sweden and United Kingdom. If you one of the chosen ones, pick up the phone and tell us your views on if and how you would like to be involved. The results of this survey will help us design future training, co-creation activities and public dialogues in the Orion Open science project.

Global societal challenges together with growing public interest in science present both opportunities as well challenges for the research world. Open Science is a way to ensure that citizens are involved in research, and that the views of different stakeholders are taken into consideration when shaping science agendas and research projects. How can science communication practitioners, researchers, policy makers and research funding bodies successfully engage with the public, and ensure that their values and interests are taken into account?

At the core of the ORION project is co-creation, which involves collaborating with different groups of people (public, policy, industry) to come up with new ideas to support and increase the impact of scientific research. Over the next two years the Babraham Institute, together with MDC in Germany, VA in Sweden, and CEITEC in the Czech Republic will launch a co-creation exercise on emerging technologies.

Genome editing tools such as CRISPR are beginning to reshape the physical world around us, one base pair at a time. As an Artist in Residence in labs at the Max Delbrück Center for Molecular Medicine (MDC) and at STATE Studio, Emilia Tikka explored how this could affect society in the future and created the exhibition “AEON - Trajectories of Longevity and CRISPR”. The project was funded by the ORION project.

The ORION citizen science project Genigma project has been selected as part of a NEWSERA initiative to increase the uptake of citizen science projects among academic researchers across the EU. This coincides with the launch of the Genigma game app which has been in development for two years by the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG).

The first co-creation event of the Citizen Science project Genigma kick-started at the Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG) in Barcelona in January where close to 40 participants engaged with their most creative ideas to develop an app to discover the genomic alterations in cancer cells. Genigma is one of the two Citizen Science projects that has received funding from the ORION project.

A major goal of the ORION project was to open a funding call that encouraged different stakeholders to come together and present new and innovate ways to make science more accessible and participatory. The overall aim of this funding call was to support long-term collaboration between unusual/different stakeholders.

Genigma is a citizen science project funded by ORION and led by Centro Nacional de Análisis Genómico at Centre for Genomic Regulation (CNAG-CRG). The goal of this 2-years project was to co-create with citizens a game for smartphones to accelerate cancer research. Citizens have collaborated on the Genigma project in...