Team:Wellesley TheTech/Outreach/Practices

BAC PACK

• TEAM
  • Members
  • Notebooks
  • Acknowledgements
• PROJECT
  • Overview
  • Digital Component
  • Wetlab Component
  • Background
  • Hardware
• HUMAN PRACTICES
  • Practices
  • Methodology
  • Collaboration
• MEDAL FULFILLMENT

HUMAN PRACTICES

Both Wellesley College and the Tech Museum have a history of addressing issues of gender, class, and education privilege in their work. Thus, BacPack for New Frontiers was designed with the goal to educate members of the community while remaining cognizant of social issues. We identified several key factors that influenced our design and work process and helped us create an installation accessible to the general public. We separate these factors into two categories: those pertaining to social accessibility, such as gender, class, and education; and those pertaining to raising awareness of synthetic biology, such as public perception and engagement.

Social Issues

There is a well known gender gap in the STEM workspace, with women holding less than a quarter of STEM jobs in the US economy*. The Wellesley_TheTech Team is committed to working towards gender balance in predominantly male areas. Our mostly-female team of Wellesley College students and three female interns meant that we designed with this in mind and worked on making an inviting exhibit that could be engaging and exciting to anyone regardless of gender.

There is also often disparity in socioeconomic status in users engaging with products, and often technologies and educational devices are not mindful of this in design. In response, our team was careful to involve students from a variety of socioeconomic status to prototype, including students from Framingham High School and the MIT-Wellesley Upward Bound Program, an educational program serving low-income and first generation high school students from the Cambridge area. In addition, we were sure that all users should be able to approach and engage with our exhibit regardless of prior scientific knowledge. As part of this process, we were careful to label resources in our exhibit such as the flasks or petri dishes that not all users may have interacted with before.

One major goal for BacPack is that it would provide an accessible platform for education and introducing synthetic biology concepts to people of various backgrounds. As it is a museum exhibit, it provides an opportunity for informal education that is more flexible and approachable than a structured academic course, for example. Therefore, more people have access to the project, and there is no requirement for any pre-existing knowledge and education for interacting with and enjoying BacPack.

Looking at public engagement is important because it is the process that brings people from different backgrounds to address and attempt to solve big issues and to bring about social change. Public engagement is important because it lets us know how much people are interested in the exhibit and if they are willing to take action or think more about social issues. For this project, we hope that users can become more interested in synthetic biology and realize the various benefits and flexibility of the field rather than viewing it as a dangerous or unethical field. We also hope that after interacting with the exhibit, users can realize the importance of creativity and tinkering when it comes to solve big problems such as sustaining life on Mars or the Deep Sea. With this exhibit, we also hope that users can understand that inventions or bio-design does not happen in a day. We convey this through the wet lab, which conveys a sense of scale, time, and the reality of syn-bio.

Perception Issues

Our project aims to break away from the misconceptions that many people have about synthetic biology and its practices. Many members of the general public have misinformed opinions about what synthetic biology entails, and the exhibit was designed with that in mind. We chose to work in extreme environments (Mars, Antarctica, and the Deep Sea) precisely because they offer an uncharted territory that does not carry the negative connotations of modifying features of everyday life. All three of these environments offer exciting new challenges to conquer and explore, and help present synthetic biology in a positive light because of that.

Visitors of the museum can approach the exhibit without any preconceived notions, and interact with it in a game-like manner. This allows us to introduce key concepts of biotinkering and biodesign in a playful way.

* https://www.whitehouse.gov/administration/eop/ostp/women 9/17/2015