Designing a Youth Social Citizen Science Handbook for the YouCount Horizon EU 2020 Project

The Horizon Europe 2020 YouCount project recently concluded, summarizing its experiences and findings in a comprehensive Handbook. SPOTTERON has been a steadfast supporter of the Social Citizen Science project, e.g., in designing the YouCount Citizen Science App, the final conference, and now in creating the design for the recently published handbook. We sincerely appreciate the inspiring collaboration with YouCount and are thrilled to present our visualization of the "Handbook of Youth Citizen Social Science: Working with Young People and the Local Community for Social Change" in this blog.

Aim of the YouCount project and Handbook

This handbook is built on the experiences of Social Science researchers who worked on designing, implementing, and evaluating YouCount. YouCount was a three-year youth citizen social science project funded under the EU Horizon 2020 SwafS programme. Its primary objective was to generate new knowledge and innovations aimed at improving the social inclusion of young people across nine European countries by experimenting with co-creative youth citizen social science, which involved young people participating as citizen social scientists in every stage of the research process. Some of the young participants were experiencing situations that put them at risk of social exclusion. Another objective was to provide evidence of the actual outcomes of conducting this type of research, along with its associated costs and benefits.

Designing the Handbook

The challenge was to bring 200 pages of research results from the Horizon YouCount project into an informative and appealing form.

To ensure clarity and organization, we decided to assign a unique color code to each main chapter of the handbook, accompanied by a distinct icon to represent its content. These elements serve as a consistent navigational guide throughout the layout, building upon the project's identity and App design established earlier. Interactive links within the table of contents facilitate easy access to specific chapters. The design utilizes clean shapes such as circles, rectangles, dotted lines, and shades of the project's identity colors. From these elements derive key features such as "Aha/Oops" moments, key findings, and perspective quotes, offering users an informative and structured insight into the lessons learned.

Download and look through the Handbook

The handbook is aimed at people interested in practical and creative social science projects, with a focus on working with young people and the local community. Its main aim is to tackle social issues and foster social change through collaborative efforts.

 
Examples of Revision of Infographics for the Handbook

We have also revised some infographics for the handbook and adapted them to the design:

  Read more about the YouCount Horizon 2020 Project, the YouCount App and our role in it: