Bridge the Gap Between the Academics and Real Social Applications

Social Research on the Energy Issue

Our IGEM project, solar hunter, is highly relevant to developing a sustainable and scalable strategy towards hydrogen production by integrating the power of synthetic biology and materials science. Our project is about an energy topic of broad interest. To better understand the energy issues from a broader perspective, and to figure out the current relationship and major differences between academic research and real industrial applications in the context of energy issues, our team carried out a wide range of social investigations. Our social investigations mainly consisted of two main parts, public questionnaire and personal interviews. The public questionnaire was implemented to be familiar to the general public attitudes. We carefully analyzed the data collected. Based on the main concerns and opinions we found through the data analysis, we invited several field experts from different walk of to participate in a series of theme interviews. Our interviewees included scientists working at the cutting-edge in energy field, industrial representatives dedicating to the energy conservation, as well as from representatives from the administrative government.

Through these social investigations, we found out that yet they shared common interests and goals, academic research are more interested in putting forward new solutions to increase energy efficiency without necessarily connecting to scalable production, while real industrial applications mainly care about costs and how a new strategy can lead to large-scale production. Our social investigation helped us to gain a better view about the developing background of the energy issue in China, and to brainstorm how our project would contribute to energy issue not only from academic perspective, but also in an industrial context.

Questionnaire

A questionnaire about the energy issue was designed and then distributed through the internet. All 37 questions were asked, and here, we performed the core analysis of the questionnaire. We have finally in all collected 231 samples, 15 of which were canceled as invalid samples due to their short answering time (less than 180 seconds). The rest of 216 samples were regarded as valid responds that qualified for further analysis.

1.Respondents’ Backgrounds

Among all, the biggest two age groups participating in the questionnaire are 18-25 and 41-50. About 39% of the respondents were from 18 to 25. 13% aged from 31 to 40. More than 35% were aged from 41 to 50. The diagram shows an ideal age distribution aged from 18 to 50, while there were few respondents below 18 or over 50. Based on the survey on education background, over 77% of the participants were well-educated with at least bachelor degrees who surely share sufficient social experience and intellects. These statistics here demonstrate and ensure the statistical significance underlying this questionnaire.

2. Awareness of the Energy Issue

When investigated on public awareness the energy issue, most respondents as 78% laid strong emphasis on the problem. They considered the energy issue as an extremely urgent social problem that needed to be solved, which strongly illustrates the huge potential value and promise for our project.

3.Knowledge of Green Energy

Asked about whether people were familiar with the green energy, only 13% of the participants chose the most familiarity. Over 51% of the samples showed insufficient knowledge in green energy, which demonstrates the need for more public propagation. And this assumption were then proved by the following question that whether it is necessary to publicly enforce the idea of green energy, with about 95% participants showed positive attitude.

However, when talked about the possible influence from the studies on green energy, over half of the participants declared the strongest attitude. And plus, another 35% were with the second strongest attitude. From this, the promising prospects to apply green energy to deal with the energy issue are apparent. Besides, our team believes that with a wider spread of the background knowledge on the topic, more and more people would be likely to support the study on green energy to solve the energy issue.

We tested on the kinds of green energy well known by the public, where the solar energy ranked first with nearly 88%. Also, we asked about the important characteristics for a good form of green energy; less pollution, strong sustainability, reasonable costs ranked at the top three. Obviously, the application of solar energy perfectly can meet all these three requirements. Also, when asked about the opinion on the application of solar energy as the main energy source, near 88% demonstrated positiveness.

4.Attitude towards Hydrogen

Speaking of the overall attitude towards the present application of hydrogen production, more than half of the participants showed a negative attitude, which was understandable due to the high costs and immature means of industrial production. However, when asked about whether the hydrogen could be a sustainable energy source, a substantial increase in positive attitude could be seen, which showed the huge potential for the further development of hydrogen. Although there were still 45% held a negative attitude towards the application of hydrogen, our team believes that people may become more and more confident about it as long as the technology are more mature and they are more familiar with the hydrogen with their main concerns eliminated.

In terms of the concerns for the application of hydrogen as an energy source, the biggest two dominating concerns were laid in safety and costs. From a scientific point of view, as long as the transportation and storage of hydrogen is proper to avoid the explosion limits, the usage of hydrogen are relatively safe. (This point were verified by the field professor though the late interview.) Actually, this is pretty much similar to the usage of coal gas and nature gas. Since people can well deal with these two inflammable gases, with the further development of relevant technologies, we hold pretty positive prospects with regards of the safety problem. However, based on our background search, the way to maintain relatively low cost producing hydrogen are still not available; and this just demonstrates the huge potential value of our project.

5.About Our Project

We briefly described the idea and mechanism of our energy-conversion platform, gaining about 63% of the positive feedback. Therefore the real application of our platform in a big productive scale is relatively promising and deserves a try. However, we also noticed the 37% with a relatively negative feedback, which also reminded us of further improvements on our idea, especially with regards to the safety, cost, and efficiency based on the feedback from previous question. And we believe that as long as the technologies are more mature and their main concerns are eliminated, people would hold a more positive point of view.

To assist our further integration of our project into real social application, further questions on the necessity of collaborations with industrial partners, academic research groups, and the government were asked.

About 62% of the participants demonstrated the strongest necessity to cooperate with some green energy related enterprises. Near 87% supported to acquire more technological assistance from the academics. More than 62% of the participant thought the supportive policy from the authority was very important for the real application. In responses to these results, further interviews from these three aspects were then scheduled.

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             <h1 align="center">Bridge the Gap Between the Academics and Real Social Applications</h1>
             <h2 align="center">Social Research on the Energy Issue</h2>
-As previously addressed, the importance and urgency to seek a feasible solution to the energy issue is undebatable. The energy issue is neither just a regional nor national problem, but instead a global one. In response to the urgent need, vast efforts and time have already been devoted to those relevant studies, however, only few of which is really able to be put into real applications. Actually, the biggest obscure restraining the feasible solution to alleviate the energy stress is mainly due to the huge gap between the research results and the massive industrialization. In another word, not only should we emphasize the technological advancements, but also we ought to raise the strong awareness to integrate the scientific results into real industrial application to yield concrete social values.<p></p>
+Our IGEM project, solar hunter, is highly relevant to developing a sustainable and scalable strategy towards hydrogen production by integrating the power of synthetic biology and materials science. Our project is about an energy topic of broad interest. To better understand the energy issues from a broader perspective, and to figure out the current relationship and major differences between academic research and real industrial applications in the context of energy issues, our team carried out a wide range of social investigations. Our social investigations mainly consisted of two main parts, public questionnaire and personal interviews.  </strong>The public questionnaire was implemented to be familiar to the general public attitudes. We carefully analyzed the data collected. Based on the main concerns and opinions we found through the data analysis, we invited several field experts from different walk of to participate in a series of theme interviews. Our interviewees included scientists working at the cutting-edge in energy field, industrial representatives dedicating to the energy conservation, as well as from representatives from the administrative government. <p></p>
-To better understand the energy issue from a border aspect, our team carried out a social research discovering the gap between the academic research and the real industrial application, especially in the context of the energy issue. The main objectives of this social research aim at socially figuring out the developing background of the energy issue as well as getting prepared for the further industrialization of our project. We want to hear from different opinions from various aspects, including the public, the academic, the industrial, and also the authority. Only when concerns from all these parties are understood, could we fully comprehend the issue in real social context, and then figure out a series of feasible solutions to profoundly contribute to our society.<p></p>
-Our social research started as early as we just decided to work on the energy issue. We built up a long-term real-time interaction with the society, instead of a simple short glimpse, for the comprehensively understanding on the issue requires continuous communications and thoughts exchanging. <strong>Generally speaking, this social research consisted of two main parts, the public questionnaire and interviews. </strong>A public questionnaire was implemented to be familiar to the general public attitudes. We carefully analyzed the data collected. And according to the main concerns and opinions we found through the data analysis, we invited several experts from different walk of to participate in a series of theme interviews. Our interviewees included scientists working at the cutting-edge in the field, industrial representatives dedicating to the energy conservation, as well as from the administrative government. With their generous engagements, our team was able to further explore the project in a social context.<p></p>
+Through these social investigations, we found out that yet they shared common interests and goals,  academic research are more interested in putting forward new solutions to  increase energy efficiency without necessarily connecting to scalable production, while real industrial applications mainly care about costs and how a new strategy can lead to large-scale production. Our social investigation helped us to gain a better view about the developing background of the energy issue in China,  and to brainstorm how our project would contribute to energy issue not only from academic perspective, but also in an industrial context.  <p></p>
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Difference between revisions of "Team:ShanghaitechChina/HP/Silver"

Revision as of 14:25, 19 October 2016