Team:Valencia UPV/Integrated Human
Kano model is a famous quality design tool among engineersto include feedback in your inventions, we applied it to know what necessities were really important for users.
Several science and art experts were interviewed to improve Printeria through their vision.
Safety has influenced Printeria more than some people use to think.
SOBRA
Overview
As Frank Chimero (designer, author and illustrator) said: "People ignore design that ignores people". Gone are the years where a lonely inventor create something in his laboratory. Nowadays user feedback becomes an essential tool to create new devices if you want them to be a necessity for users.
This year in Printeria we have decided to apply user feedback in two different ways:an engineering way with the Kano Model directed to school users and a direct one with experts.
Kano Model
What is Kano Model
Study case
Impossible figure artwork. Yturraldes's masterpiece and the equivalent Microbial Art version
Future generations
High school students are eager to know more about the world they live in. However, students rarely learn about Synthetic Biology inside classrooms. As there is a lack of hand-on STEM curricula, basic concepts such as gene, DNA and bacteria are only explained theoretically. In order to stimulate young people to be curious about science and to promote the critical thinking on scientific foundations, we believe this educational approach needs to be changed.
Activity
To do so, we gave some talks to several high school classes, in which we talked about:
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iGEM and SynBio as a multidisciplinary research field
We talked about the iGEM competition and the future of SynBio as a research field that can help to solve nowadays issues.
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Bacteria: enemies or friends?
We wanted to beat the stigma against bacteria, explaining their importance and benefits, not only naturally (i.e.: they form our microbiote and they are the base of the trophic chains), but also in biotechnology (i.e.: bacteria as biofactories for medicine, industry, etc.)
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Printeria: how it really works?
As SynBio is not only about biology, we thought it was also highly important to demonstrate the role of engineering and electronics. Thus, we decided to explain them, from an educational approch, the basis of Printeria: our software and how the digital microfluidic system allows us to control each biotech process with high accuracy. During the talk, we showed them several videos and photos to ease each explanation and to ensure studens could understand such kind of a priori complex concepts.
European Research Night
The European Research Night is a wide-public event, promoted under the EU Programme Horizon 2020, whose objective is to to encourage the scientific/technical youth vocations and lay public interest to science. It involves research organizations, science museums and public organizations all around Europe.
Activity
As part of this event the City of Arts and Science, one of the biggest scientific and cultural leisure complexes in Europe, organized a complete program of free access activities, including interactive experiments, scientific monologues and researchers talks. We were invited to be part of this program to present Printeria to a wide range of interested people from all ages, who listened our speech with great interest.
UPV Welcome Fest
UPV_iGEM is part of the Design Factory Global Network. This is a network of universities innovation hubs all around the world, whose mission is to create change in the world of learning through passion-based culture and effective problem solving.
Activity
As part of the UPV Welcome Fest, a Design Factory Exhibition was organized in order to explain the diversity of projects being carried out by the Design Factory teams. There, we had the chance to show Printeria to all the university community and to explain the basic concepts of SynBio to those who didn't know about it.
References
(1) Bioart: An introduction https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/11/151123203619.htm
(2) Bravo, E. G. & García, J. A. (2015). Yturralde: Impossible Figure Generator. Leonardo 48(4), 366-374. The MIT Press. Retrieved October 8, 2018, from Project MUSE database.