Team:Imperial College/Integrated Practices

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.).

How are you doing reflexivity?

Reflexivity is a difficult concept to grasp, and even more difficult to employ without a formalised approach to it. S.T.I.R. is supposed to take the form of a structured, cyclic discussion which is supposed to take place with members of a lab about decisions made over the course of a research project. The discussions are organized as follows:

  1. One is presented with an opportunity, or something that requires a decision be made.
  2. Its scope is further considered through background research and the shared experiences of the group’s members.
  3. Alternatives to the opportunity are proposed.
  4. Next, a decision is made and acted upon.
  5. Finally, the group goes back and reconsiders that outcome.

We built upon this framework to determine our own specific questions to ask ourselves at each stage in the S.T.I.R. protocol. Here are some of the key questions we asked ourselves:

  1. What is the decision you’re trying to make?
  2. What are the societal, economic, environmental, and ethical impacts of the solution?
  3. Alternatives to the opportunity are proposed.
  4. What other solutions are there?
  5. Who are the stakeholders that will care how you intend to solve the problem?

We designated Humanists on our team who identified opportunities or decisions to employ the protocol. Recorded our discussions to show their impact on the course of our project.

Here is a template for our initial S.T.I.R. protocol:

Here is a record of our reflexive analysis:

How did you modify it?

After trying to employ the protocol, we discovered our group was having difficulty defining what a constituted a decision or opportunity. Many “decisions” we made over the course of our project, like building a web database for co-culture, only became clear to us after they had developed. We reconsidered the S.T.I.R. method and realized that we were thinking of the protocol in the wrong way. The “decisions” we were making were due to problems we were facing in the lab. Here are some problems that we have encountered: “There is no current database for co-culture data”, “We need a better growth regulation module”. As time progressed, we felt the protocol was useful but felt like a lot of extra work for sometimes little pay off.

Therefore, we reimagined the protocol as a problem solving tool with the added benefit of including dimensions that are not normally related to the lab in the problem solving process. We defined problems as:

“Any discussion where you are unsure of the outcome that will have an impact on your project.”

We adapted the S.T.I.R. protocol to include elements from the problem-based learning framework. After some team discussions, we felt the modifications made reflexivity easier to employ because it became more integrated in the development of the project.

Here is a copy of our revised protocol:

Here is a record of our modified reflexive analysis:

What were some of the key outcomes?

Here is a summary of the impact of our reflexive analysis: Colour demonstration (include reflexive analysis sheets)
Development of the game (include reflexive analysis sheets)
Development of the web tool (include reflexive analysis sheets)
Development of the visualisation strategy (include reflexive analysis sheets)