My Naturewatch Camera: Disseminating Practice Research with a Cheap and Easy DIY Design

My Naturewatch Camera is an inexpensive wildlife camera that we designed for people to make themselves as a way of promoting engagement with nature and digital making. We aligned its development to the interests of the BBC’s Natural History Unit as part of an orchestrated engagement strategy also involving our project website and outreach to social media. Since June 2018, when the BBC featured the camera on one of their Springwatch 2018 broadcasts, over 1000 My Naturewatch Cameras have been constructed using instructions and software from our project website and commercially available components, without direct contact with our studio. In this paper, we describe the project and outcomes with a focus on its success in promoting engagement with nature, engagement with digital making, and the effectiveness of this strategy for sharing research products outside traditional commercial channels.