Team:Edinburgh/Practices/Biohack
Biohack: Encouraging Public Innovation
By this point, we felt it was time to put the lessons we learned into practice. After talking to Adam Winstocke, we knew that we could improve our biosensor by incorporating software into its design. This would ideally be an application for a smartphone that could interpret the results of the biosensor and provide a text-based output that was easy-to-read for the end user. However, designing an app with this ability is no easy task, and we knew we needed help. That's when we recalled the guiding principle behind the Synenergene initiative: open collaboration between SynBio, the public and stakeholders is mutually beneficial. Thus, we set out to find a way to bring all three of these groups together in attempts to solve the software dilemma, and that's when the idea came to mind: we should host a biohack.
A biohack is a type of hackathon, which are computer hacking events where teams and individuals come together at a specified location to create the most innovative
After a series of skypes with the entire Synergene pannell, each team was allocated to a specific supervisor. Our team was assigned to Dr. Laurens Landeweerd, a philosophy assistant professor at Radboud University Nijmegen’s Institute for Science Innovation and Society and researcher at Delft University of Technology (section Biotechnology&Society).
Dr. Landeweerd suggested that we should first consider dilemmas of a practical nature, which we may call ‘application scenarios’. Examples of these include situations where our biosensor provides inaccurate results, or faces legal/manufacturing difficulties. Click on the link below to read our report that details, and provides solutions to, several application scenarios: