Team:Imperial College/Human Practices
A term coined by social scientists, it refers to a process whereby a social scientist visits a lab over the course of a project, and facilitates discussions about the impact of decisions made in the lab. We adapted the process for iGEM teams that do not necessarily have access to sociologists, and documented our approach HERE!
Foundational science can be difficult for non-specialists to understand and engage with. Science communication often focuses on an application "hook", which relates the topic to everyday life. Our team believed that this “hook” application limits engagement to the space of that defined application. This would be because people would automatically relate the foundational project to this specific application instead of considering the whole range of potential applications for which the system could be use for. While presenting our project to various audiences, we found data visualisation to be an effective medium for communicating the fundamental science of our project. We compiled a guide to visual communication for other iGEM teams based on our experiences, which can be found HERE!
We created a game, Go Culture, to engage people about co-culturing. We took this, and some of our visualisations to the New Scientist Live event and a high school in London. You can read about our experiences HERE!
Click here to learn more about our Silver Criteria Human Practices!
Click here to learn more about our Gold Criteria Human Practices!
