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. As a foundational technology, PixCell has the potential to substantially impact our society. When computers were first connected in a network, it eventually led to the creation of the internet. Who could have predicted these events wide-reaching effects on society, both positive and negative? Analogously, predicting all possible effects of our technology is equally challenging, electrical-biological interfaces open up a totally new realm of possibilities. 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 the effectiveness of our communications for Integrated Human Practices and outreach, we have designed the Communications Strategy Guide which we have used extensively to guide our Integrated Human Practices and Outreach. Why we developed this tool is explained in more detail in the Communication tab.
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.
Dialogue with potential users of our technology made it clear that the use of toxic redox modulators in our system is a major hindrance for the adoption of PixCell in future applications. This led us to search for alternative redox modulators and resulted in the discovery of PMS. This major shift in our project is documented here .
During iGEM we identified that internal friction in teams is a common issue as proven to us by our experience as well as a survey that we conducted amongst 67 iGEM members from 14 other teams. To address this issue we developed our team-communication app(LTAT) to help improve team communication both internally and in other teams. Using our team-communication app improved team-dynamics and reduced conflict.
Following the Communications Strategy Guide, we have designed, optimized and received feedback for all our outreach events. We commissioned artists to create an art exhibition to better demonstrate our project visually. We also showed these pieces at New Scientist Live! Fair where we were doing outreach for our project and synthetic biology. We created a board game to demonstrate key concepts in synthetic biology in an intuitive way. We hosted a socio-ethics discussion on synthetic biology and gathered potential socio-ethical concerns on our project in the form of feedback. Lastly, we engaged with our own community at Imperial College, where we helped out or created many outreach events.
A short PDF guide summarizing all we have done for Human Practices, Outreach and Education is downloadable below:
