Team:Imperial College/Human Practices
Human Practices
Our approaches to Human Practices
“A society that permits biology to become an engineering discipline, that allows that science to slip into the role of changing the living world without trying to understand it, is a danger to itself ” (Woese, 2004)
Human Practices involves assessing our project in relation to society. When pitching our idea as a means of unifying electronics and synthetic biology, we struggled to think about not only the potential applications of the technology, but also how our technology could be implemented. We quickly realized the need of communicating with people of different backgrounds as their unique perspectives help shape potential applications and predict societal impact for our technology.
Our approach for Human Practices therefore revolves around the concept of communication. Our goal with Human Practices is to engage with all relevant stakeholders as early and efficiently as possible in order to integrate their feedback into PixCell. To maximize effectiveness of our communications for Integrated Human Practices and outreach, we have designed a team-communication app as well as a Communications Strategy Guide which we have used extensively to guide our Integrated Human Practices and Outreach. Why we developed both of these tools are explained in more detail in the Communication tab under Human Practices.
For Integrated Human Practices, we utilized the Communications Strategy Guide to better communicate with relevant stakeholders. In our case, we contacted PIs, artists and the public who came up with ideas on applying our project in the areas of alternative inducers, fabric printing and biocontainment respectively. We also integrated the team-communication app to improve team-dynamics and reducing conflict.
A short PDF guide summarizing all we have done for Human Practices, Outreach and Education is downloadable below:
