Team:Wellesley TheTech/Outreach/Methodology

BAC PACK

• TEAM
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  • Notebooks
  • Acknowledgements
• PROJECT
  • Overview
  • Digital Component
  • Wetlab Component
  • Background
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• OUTREACH
  • Practices
  • Methodology
  • Collaboration
• MEDAL FULFILLMENT

METHODOLOGY

 Our team applied a user-centered design process (UCD) when designing BacPack for New Frontiers. This procedure focuses on the user’s needs and ultimately creating the most intuitive and user-friendly product. After researching users’ pre-existing knowledge and intuitive behaviors, we edit product designs accordingly to make our software more intuitive and useful rather than requiring users to conform to an unfamiliar format. We conduct user studies during each new iteration to ensure we are building the most effective and user-friendly product.

&nbspFollowing, we describe prior research we conducted on designing museum exhibits, four major prototypes, the user feedback we received on its design, and the changes we made to better fit users’ goals.

&nbspTo ensure that our museum exhibit could be user-friendly and educational, we consulted other researchers exploring the design and use of interactive technology to design innovative learning experiences, such as Mike Horn, director of Northwestern’s TIDAL Lab, and Stephanie Houde, principal designer of Houde Interaction Design. We drew design concepts from TIDAL’s DeepTree exhibit, a multi-touch tabletop interface that allows users to explore an interactive visualization of the Tree of Life, as well as their multiplayer exhibit Fishing with Friends where visitors play in a simulated fishing environment to learn about overfishing. We were also inspired by the focus of creature creation from The Boston Museum of Science’s Virtual Fishtank exhibit, which allows visitors to create and deploy personally engineered creations into a communal environment to see how different combinations of traits in fish interacted with one another.

&nbspIn addition to visiting current museum exhibits, We also studied literature including Humphrey’s Fostering Active Prolonged Engagement, papers by Alissa N. Antle, and research paper “Designing Visible Engineering: Supporting Tinkering Performances in Museums”. We received additional advice from our collaborators Romie Littrell and Anja Scholze, both museum curators and exhibit developers. We also consulted Natalie Kuldell, founder of BioBuilder, on basic synthetic biology concepts and its applications, as well as other iGEM teams to understand how we could best incorporate accurate scientific procedures into our design.

&nbspWe began the decision process knowing that we wanted users to have a space to design, and a separate environment where they could deploy their engineered bacteria. Our first prototype featured single-person stations, the option to “test” your bacteria in the workspace before sending it to the environment, and a “friend” who displayed instructions and feedback (see image). We also had a “Challenge Button” where the friend would ask users to create specific combinations (see image). Users were given a clipboard with information about their particular environment to give users hints about what kind of combinations would be beneficial to the environment, as well as a separate scanner where users could place tangibles and learn more about that particular BioBrick.

&nbspOn June 18th, we presented this initial prototype to two young boys aged six and nine. Both were engaged and interested in the prototype, but it was clear that the premise was too broad and not intriguing enough. The testers suggested making the “Challenges” more difficult, as well as possibly incorporating video clips into the exhibit. Our team also decided to shift the focus from helping the friend and focus on how the users’ bacteria changed the environment. To highlight the impact the bacteria had, we added status bars which displayed the amount of resources in the environment. We also wanted to maximize the number of users per screen and increase collaboration between multiple users, so we began to brainstorm ideas on designs that would allow multiple users to work at once.