Integrated Human Practice: (evidence)
We took into account every aspect of human practice into our project, firstly, we integrated HP into the work by backing up every scientific research and lab experiments with an upstream human practice study. In addition to that, we have been careful to thoughtfully implement our work in the actual context, to make sure it addresses current concerns of our society. In the process, we were careful not to skip any step and to develop our project in a didactic manner, that hopefully can be built upon by others (all of our research and methods can be found in the wiki). Finally, we spread the word about our team and our project as much as possible, and we got very positive feedback (from school pupils, high school students, scientists and the general public, and hopefully our project and our team has inspired some of them.
Education and Public engagement:(evidence)Our team focused a great part of the work on education and public engagement, in an attempt to reach the most various public possible starting with middle school and high school students, through game-like activities followed by animated debats. Then moving on to a more informed audience during conferences and scientific events (such as the Zika summit and the “Festival Vivant” where we presented our project in front of the public, generating a constructive discussion. And finally, we did our best at sparking the public’s interest by reaching out to them through polls, both online and on the street. We would like to believe these exchanges resulted in a win-win situation, since both our team and the public learnt a lot from these interactions.
Entrepreneurship: (evidence)From the earliest stages of our project, we conceived it in view of taking it further after the competition by putting our efforts not only towards the biological aspect but on every facet of setting up a business. We made a field analysis to evaluate the needs for our system. After establishing a strong potential demand, we developed our biosilica-based detection patch and mosquito trap, and we set up a complete implementation strategy of our system (e.g: staffing needs, cost, targeted public, competition). We also developed the mapping application that operates in addition to the trapping and analysis system. All along the process, we used the expertise of our three intellectual property law students, and we highly relied on the help of our sponsors, to whom we frequently pitched ideas and presented our project, and who gave us the financial support we needed to complete our project.
Applied Design:(evidence)
Since the begining of our work, we thought about the project not only as a scientific innovation but most importantly as a global scenario. We defined every actor that the project would involve and their role, from local administrators to “reservist” citizens. Consequently, we designed the two physical components that make the link between our bioproduced patch and the potential users. The technical and functional specifications have been defined closely to meet the scientific constraints. A great deal of attention was devoted to safety issues, user friendliness, but also to the aesthetics and ergonomics of shapes. We kept in mind the constraints of low cost objects not depending on electric power. We went from sketches to 3D models, to 3D printing, and the outcome was a set of quite functional prototypes.
