Team:Imperial College/Integrated Practices
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:
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:
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:
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| Opportunity |
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| Considerations |
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| Alternatives |
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| Outcomes |
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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:
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| Opportunity/The Problem |
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| Prior Knowledge/What do we know? |
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| Prior Knowledge/What do we know? | |
| Research & Learn | |
| Considerations |
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| Alternatives |
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| Solve The Problem |
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| Outcomes |
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| Report/Present |
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| Reflect & Evaluate |
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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)
Visual Strategies
One of the key outcomes of our reflexive analysis was the development of our “Visual Strategies Experiential Guidebook”. We realized that there were many opportunities for designers and artists and sociologists and other non-specialists to have an impact on the future applications of our enabling technology. However, it was extremely difficult to communicate the power of our technology to these audiences. After 6 hours of official meetings and several hours of discussion with students and faculty at the Royal College of Art, we realized that visual media was the key to quick understanding. We refined our presentations, developing interesting graphics. We took feedback from our small audience. We researched best practices for the composition of graphics. We finally created visualisations that were easy for them to process and synthesize meaningful feedback. Moreover, after finally creating a visualisation that was easy to understand, we were astonished by some of the things they suggested. One of those things was modular phenotype engineering. This was a concept we had not considered for our project. From this experience, we decided that our project needed more input from non-specialists. Therefore, we compiled all of the information we had received from literature and from these artists and designers and created a visualisation guidebook. The visualisation guidebook has had an impact on the presentation of our project, most notably on the infographic and computer game Go-Culture we presented at the New Scientist Live in London. We included our thought process and some of the critiques we received from the artists and designers at the Royal College of Art in the book.
Some of the highlights from the book and our research were:
- Choosing a compelling story that can be supported with interestingly represented graphical data
- Classification and examples of visualisations in synthetic biology
- Rules for compositions of graphics to create easy to follow visual hierarchies that guide viewers through a process or story without the use of extraneous arrows or other symbols
- Interactive content is best for increasing comprehension and satisfaction with audiences
- A compendium of resources to make compelling visual media
- A culminating example on our infographics and game we presented at the New Scientist Live event in London
Conclusion
We hope that our journey through S.T.I.R will be able to inspire more future foundational iGEM teams to consider new approaches for integrated human practices. By doing so we believe that they will uncover new ways to reflect on the different dimensions of their project, which will help them making more coherent decisions when facing challenging problems through the whole duration of their project.
