Team:UC San Diego/Human Practices Silver
Integrated Human Practices
Incorporating a Novel Communication Paradigm for iGEM Teams
As a new team, we looked to past teams who had engaged in stakeholder interactions and Integrated Human Practices to guide our own intuition. Our team quickly realized that often times, other teams simply spoke to other domain experts or end users without having a fully thought-out approach that would allow for integration of advice into project design and deployment. It was also important to realize that a lot of the narratives that teams put forward were extremely linear: the interactions did not invite the team to consider the impact of their decisions or help them optimize their overall design.
In our day-to-day operations, we also experienced the struggles of cross-team discussion. It was quite difficult for people in the wetlab to keep track of what the drylab team was doing, or to keep track of what the entrepreneurship group was trying to deploy. It was also sometimes difficult to ascertain the broad-scale impact of our interactions with certain experts or stakeholders. We were also sure that our team was not the only one to experience such difficulties. To resolve these issues, our team came up with a novel paradigm that we believe will help streamline project issues for future teams.
Similar to the design-build-test cycle that Imperial College introduced in 2006, our team believes that although there is a continuous flow of information and need for integration into the project, we can create three phases for the project with the following methodology.
Recognize
From the scientific method, something that every elementary school student has learned, it is important to use observations (personal and those of others) to identify problems and then seek solutions
Recognize can be split into two cyclical elements:
Problem Definition
Identify the particular space that you are interested in/ the area that the problem resides and begin to use foundational literature to understand core elements of the problem: Why does it exist? Does the problem differ across different settings? Why is this?
Constraint determination
Although knowing about the problem you are trying to solve is important, it is important to realize that the problem does not exist in a vacuum; it exists because the real world imposes some sort of constraint (technical, environmental, social, etc.) that prevents the solution from being implemented in the ideal manner.
Although there are several different types of constraints, as mentioned above, we encouraged ourselves and future teams to first nail down the specific technical constraints that exist. There are several different approaches to constraint determination. Focusing on the values that are important to you as an individual and to your entire time can help guide your decision-making process.
Stakeholder identification can also dictate who you should talk and about the topic of discussion; a stakeholder is defined as anyone who may be impacted by your activity or may be impacted by someone who is directly impacted by your activity. As a diagnostics team, our challenge was to bridge the gap in communication between engineers and medical professionals: to address this, we spoke with healthcare professionals, synthetic biologists, academia, industry professionals and executives over the course of our project. Our initial interactions focused on the technical challenges of designing our methodology, especially the need for a non-invasive cancer detection technology that did not rely on chemical treatment.
