Co Creation

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.

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.

Talking about pollution on a global level is important, but for communities, it is equally important to understand and discuss how pollution is affecting their local environment. Protecting areas of local natural beauty is crucial in local communities, but this is difficult to achieve if people don’t know about the environmental threats that their local area faces. Klára Vaculíková from Brno University technology designed a project to engage school classes who helped to monitor levels of the water pollutant phosphorus in the Moravský kras which is a spectacular natural limestone feature to the north of Brno. This project was funded as part of a co-creation call from the ORION partner JCMM.

The MELTIC project “Ideas MELting pot for TIC and Health Science for Citzens in Small communities” coordinated by the ORION partner Carlos III National Health Institute, ISCIII , is the winner of the ORION call for Novel Co-creation Initiatives after competing against eleven other European project proposals. The project will improve the quality of life for EU citizens in small communities by co-creating and developing ICT health services with stakeholders.

The aim with ORION is to explore ways in which research and funding organisations in life sciences and biomedicine can open up the way they fund, organise, and practice research. We have recently conducted a study in six European countries about the public’s attitudes toward Open Science and genome editing. At ESOF 2018 we would like to have your views.

On 9 March the final ORION Open Science roundtable was organised by the ORION partner JCMM in Brno, Czech Republic. This was the final leg in the JCMM co-creation scheme which was launched in June 2018 debating the Open Science framework with representatives from academia, local government, business, NGOs, students and the general public.