Team:Tokyo Tech/Human Practices/National museum

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Discussion with science communicater

Contents

1. Introduction

2. Lessons

3. Improvement

4. Conclusion

1. Introduction

Many iGEM teams worked on various activities to remove public misunderstanding about synthetic biology. Recently, some iGEM teams used media such as SNS or vide sites in attempt to let more people know about synthetic biology. Though these energetic activities, misunderstandings about synthetic biology remains. We thought its reason was the way of communicating. So, we decided to dialogue with Mr. Ogawa, who is a the science communicator, as well as athe professional of communicating science to public. He taught us the important lessons of communicating science or studies to public. The lessons are shown below.

2. Lessons

・Explore one’s common points with the audience.

・We should try to figure out what the audience already knew and what they want to know about the contents we are to say.

・Whether we should include the specific knowledge that is not easy to understand.

・What will the audience feel about our ideas? What will they think about our ideas? And how long will our ideas influence them?

・We should be aware is that what the audience want to know may not match with what we want to convey.

・It is important how we start and end the dialogue.

3. Improvement

Base on these advice, we had another discussion about how to present our project.

3-1. Before discussion

We want to use the story of Snow White, which is a familiar story to most of the audience to let the audience understand our project as well as E.coli and synthetic biology.

3-2. After discussion

First, we decided what we want to convey to the public, making sure we explain it in an illegible way. To be specific, we want the public to know not only knowledge about E. coli and synthetic biology, but also TA system. However, it is difficult to decide how much specific knowledge should we include in the explanation.

Also, there is a possibility that the public may not understand the message we transmitted by just listening to our explanation. We should determine what the public want to know and where they have an interest in. And based on the results, it is necessary to change the outgoing method of our project accordingly. In fact, through the communication with the general public, we found that there exist a general interest in the utility of TA system (see Nishi high school page). It is considered to be the opportunity to let the general public to get to know TA system by presenting our proposals of it is future utility . In addition, in terms of getting more people to know the TA system, the increasing number of professional description in the explanation of TA system is inevitable. Thus we used the familiar story of "Snow White" to help the general public to understand.

4. Conclusion

To the general public, TA system will have nothing related to whether we can live in this world. However, in our project, by representing the utility of our project which the general public interested in and using the familiar story of Snow White as our theme, we were able to let more people get interested in the TA system.