Difference between revisions of "Team:Imperial College/Integrated Practices"

Revision as of 11:27, 16 October 2016

integrated human practices

A customized approach to the S.T.I.R. protocol for responsible innovation.

What are you doing?

This year, the Imperial College London 2016 iGEM team created two original pieces of integrated human practices work. The first, is a new approach to employing sociological term “reflexivity” in an iGEM project. The second is a researched and critiqued visual strategy for communication about foundational technologies and basic research, that most importantly impacted two visualisation pieces we presented at the first ever New Scientist Live event.

First of all, integrated human practices are defined as the consideration of the ethical, legal, or environmental issues, among others, surrounding one’s project and having them influence the execution of it. Teams participating in the foundational track of the iGEM competition are limited to talking to other scientists about their work because of the degree of technicality and apparent lack of applicability of their projects to the “real world.” That is not to say that foundational teams do not need to consider wider implications of their work. Decisions made on a day-to-day basis in the lab can have significant consequences inside as well as outside of the lab. Reflecting on those decisions, can uncover broader societal concerns which would otherwise go unconsidered in the development of a project. This process has been termed by social scientists as “reflexivity.” Therefore, our team decided to build on our knowledge of reflexivity, formalise our approach, and implement a customised version of the Socio-Technical Integration Research protocol (S.T.I.R.).

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-               Background
+               What are you doing?
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-           We began our brainstorming in late June by trying to identify key challenges facing the world today, such as climate change and antimicrobial resistance. This led us to consider how synthetic biology might be be used to solve the problems that we had
+           This year, the Imperial College London 2016 iGEM team created two original pieces of integrated human practices work. The first, is a new approach to employing sociological term “reflexivity” in an iGEM project. The second is a researched and critiqued visual strategy for communication about foundational technologies and basic research, that most importantly impacted two visualisation pieces we presented at the first ever New Scientist Live event.
-          identified. We considered different project proposals, and formed smaller sub-groups tasked with researching those proposals, before pitching them to PhDs, post-docs, and PIs from Centre for Synthetic Biology at Imperial College. We also collaborated
-          with students from the Royal College of Art, who challenged us to be more creative in our brainstorming and to consider the actual applications for our theories.
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-           The feedback we received during these sessions was very useful in refining our ideas. We deconstructed our project proposals into their component parts, which helped us to identify the most interesting aspects of our proposals. We discarded those aspects
+           First of all, integrated human practices are defined as the consideration of the ethical, legal, or environmental issues, among others, surrounding one’s project and having them influence the execution of it. Teams participating in the foundational track of the iGEM competition are limited to talking to other scientists about their work because of the degree of technicality and apparent lack of applicability of their projects to the “real world.” That is not to say that foundational teams do not need to consider wider implications of their work. Decisions made on a day-to-day basis in the lab can have significant consequences inside as well as outside of the lab.  Reflecting on those decisions, can uncover broader societal concerns which would otherwise go unconsidered in the development of a project.  This process has been termed by social scientists as “reflexivity.” Therefore, our team decided to build on our knowledge of reflexivity, formalise our approach, and implement a customised version of the Socio-Technical Integration Research protocol (S.T.I.R.).
-          of our project proposals, which we deemed to have less practical value. The proposals that we finally settled on, as potential projects, included the following: bacterial associative learning, biosilica production, cell-free antimicrobial peptide
-          production, genetic Turing machines, and sonogenetics. Many of our preferred project proposals relied on complex genetic circuits that would be impractical to construct in a single chassis.
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-        <p class="indent">
-          Our group settled on the concept of synthetic ecology as a means of spreading complex circuits and pathways across multiple microbial populations as our project proposal. After talking to researchers at Imperial, we realized that although interest in
-          the area was widespread, there was a lack of standardized approaches for working with co-cultures. Our objective is therefore to develop a framework for working with co-cultures that can be used by other iGEM teams in the future. Furthermore,
-          we aim to demonstrate the effectiveness of our system by applying it to a critical challenge, such as renewable chemical and material production, waste treatment, or bioremediation.
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