Team:The Tech Museum/Community

Community Engagement

The Tech Museum of Innovation’s primary mission is to inspire a new generation of innovators with the confidence and skills to create technologies that benefit humanity. Technological change is tightly connected to social change, and an equitable society is necessary for pervasive technological change. By creating spaces where our community can learn to think and to speak in the language of science and engineering, especially those marginalized by traditional models, we are able to give our visitors stronger agency to improve society.

Our community also has one of the highest levels of diversity in the US, both racially and economically. This unique context allows and obligates us to incorporate social justice issues into our prototyping methods. Along with the well studied balance disparities with gender and economic background in science and engineering fields, we also target age in our prototype evaluation. By emphasizing hands on, iterative goals over content, we aim to invite adults to participate more in the activities, both alone or with their children.

During the weeks that we had our exhibit on the museum floor doing data collection, we interacted with many people during their visits to the Tech Museum of Innovation. Altogether, we collected data with visitors from 61 individual experiments analyzed a total of 2674 colonies of bacteria. Many of these experiments were done with larger families or friend groups, so the actual number of people we directly interacted with was much larger.

We also created a video (on Home page) and written summary (link below) aimed at explaining our project to a general audience.

Executive Summary

Approach and Methods

The Tech’s approach to exhibits is a shift from the more traditional learning outcome goals. Our top priority is the development of skills and confidence with our exhibition topics and we highly value design challenge based interactive exhibits. We take this approach with our exhibit prototyping process as well and believe that ideation, iteration, and evaluation, should begin at the research phase.

Evaluation of e.pixels' approach

The underlying question driving our iGEM project was: can we develop a museum exhibit that promotes public engagement in and understanding of synthetic biology through a hands-on engineering of bacteria and data collection? As detailed elsewhere, the general approach we took was to develop an interactive exhibit in which visitors both make and analyze multi-colored bacteria. In the end, this approach did allow us to successfully produced a fully functioning first prototype of an hands-on synthetic biology experience!

From a biology perspective, the tri-color plasmid pools we designed for our project were effective at randomizing bacteria colony color. We were able to identify conditions such that we could efficiently transform bacteria with these plasmid pools using the existing visitor wetlab setup. This allows for the easy incorporation of our new tool into the already optimized visitor transformation experience and supporting staff workflow. Thus, we were able to create a ‘hands-on engineering of bacteria’ experience that is accessible to visitors as we had hoped. Overall, people thought that the multi-colored fluorescent bacteria were very interesting and older participants understood the basic concepts of how they were made.

From a software perspective, we created apps that could easily be used by museum visitors to quantify bacteria colony number and color. Using these tools, we were able to generate a visitor-driven data set exploring the frequency and diversity of colony colors generated by our pool of fluorescent tri-color plasmids. Furthermore, visitors responded very positively to their experience at our bacteria photobooth station and to seeing how their plate data contributed to and modified the aggregate group data.

Another important goal of our iGEM project was to create an interactive exhibit that allowed people of all ages and with no biology background to become part of our team. This first prototype successfully did that! More than 60 experiments were run on the museum floor with visitors who ranged from 5-year-olds to adults. With direction, everyone was able to complete the activity and contribute to our collective data set, which was the goal. It was apparent that across such a large age range, there were vast differences in the amount of knowledge about the underlying biology that each person took away. The smallest kids were mostly just wowed by the glowing colors, while many adults were curious for deeper explanations than were directly incorporated into our exhibit. Figuring out how to engage across to this wide range of levels will be an interesting future challenge.

Advantages and limitations of method:

Advantages include:

• Ease of use: even young kids could easily use the bacterial photobooth to contribute to our data, which allowed us to interact with a larger audience
• Visually exciting: the appeal of color is fairly universal and was therefore an very effective way to spark people's curiosity and draw them in to the activity
• Can be integrated directly into our established museum wetlab: has already been optimized for effective transformation of bacteria by visitors and is a known museum favorite

Limitations include:

• Only one visitor can participate at a time: limits number of people who can participate and kids get impatient, which caused some groups to be not interested in participating since it was more of an individual activity
• Explanation of underlying biology is very simplistic: at the current level of detail, it helps kids understand, but not enough depth to satisfy the curiosity of older participants which some people found unsatisfying
• No interactive component during data analysis part of photobooth station: older visitors were sometimes less engaged in this part of the activity as the entire this was automated

Management of Limitations:

The limitations to our method presented some challenges, but all were possible to work around in for this first prototype. Since the current bacteria photobooth station can be overwhelmed with with too many people, we did our prototyping with visitors on in areas of the museum where we could manage the number of visitors that we invited to conduct the activity at a single time. Families and groups of older visitors were fine, but we tried to avoid large groups of children since the one-at-a-time capacity could not keep that many engaged at once. Since we were actively prototyping during our entire data collection phase for iGEM, we were easily able to manage the limitation in depth of biology discussed in the actual exhibit by having team members there to facilitate knowledge transfer for those who were interested. At this stage of development, we managed the lack of interactive data analysis in a similar fashion: through the presence of and interaction with an exhibit facilitator. In general, these limitation gave us great insight into future changes and additions that would improve our exhibit.

Visitor Feedback and Impacts on Project
As part of our approach, we wanted to employ an iterative design process based on the acquisition and incorporation of user feedback. Thus, we spent several weeks on the museum floor engaging a diverse visitors with evolving prototypes our hands-on exhibit station. This time allowed us to get immediate feedback from visitors about their experience with the activity, which was very valuable.

Visitor feedback was collected in two ways, mostly depending on the age of the participant and amount of time they had. Adult participants were asked to fill out a short feedback survey to give us insight into the most successful or weakest parts of the activity and whether they had actually learned anything. Below is the feedback form used.

We took a different approach with young children, who make up a majority of the museum’s visitors. For them, a short verbal feedback session was done after completion of the bacteria photobooth station. Again, we focused on figuring out their enjoyment of the activity, what they learned, what they liked, and what they wished had been part of the activity.

Whenever possible, visitor feedback was immediately incorporated into our prototyping. This included things like reworking the introduction to our photobooth station. Our very first prototype had a limited introduction with dense directions. After getting feedback from visitors, we created a new, more step-wise introduction that contained a clearer explanation of the underlying biology. This design was a far more effective, and one that we continued to make minor tweaks to based evolving input from participants. Based on participant input, the frontend of the Rainbow Reader software for color analysis was also modified from its initial look to be much more simple and visually appealing.

Additionally, we received valuable feedback about possible large scale changes or conceptual additions that visitor felt would improve the exhibit. Visitors thought that the photobooth station could be improved by making the colored bacteria colonies on the Rainbow Reader plate image screen touch sensitive. This feature would allow visitors to personally explore all of their colors and data before computer vision analysis of the plate was performed. We hope to incorporate this great idea into future versions of our scanning software. Adults visitors also often commented that the exhibit made them interested to know where they could learn more about engineering bacteria. This depth of information does not exist in our current activity, but we hope to add in access to that information in future prototypes. The exhibit could be extended to include supplemental activities to allow people to further explore more complex synthetic biology concepts after we spark their curiosity.

Beyond the bench: Social Justice

e.pixels’ approach to addressing gender, economic background and age diversity

Context

Even at it’s simplest, the engineering of DNA requires a shift in perspective from what most of our visitors are routinely familiar with. The go-to metaphor of patchwork husbandry, putting a chunk of one animal onto another and getting something like a giraffe with a trunk, belies the fundamental nature of DNA. When speaking even very simply about bacteria, vocabulary like “plasmid” is useful and raises the question of what the optimum level of content should be attempted during an activity.

Differential responses between demographic groups are a crucial focus in designing exhibit prototypes that may skew the interest of one group over another. Our method of many sessions of quick, low fidelity props, images, and text can spur new ideas and answer questions, but can be confounded by the diversity of test groups and subtle differences between test sessions. At a high level it seems obvious to track all measures of every test group, but in practice, aggregating test data to pick one direction over another is common practice.

Approaches

Two common approaches at The Tech is reviewing relevant exhibit case studies and user centered design. The ultimate goal of both is to determine what visitors will naturally be drawn to and engage with in Synthetic Biology.

Looking back to previous exhibitions, our Social Robots had a similar issue with gender skewing. When different types of robot-based assembly activity prototypes were created, they often had wheels as a means of movement. This subtle signaling that it was a “car” or “tank” seemed to draw more males over females. When animal-based robots with limbs and faces were later introduced, that skew shifted back to more gender neutral. With that learning, the direction of the entire robotics exhibition began to shift toward human-robot social topics and, in the end, a more modern and thought provoking perspective.

The second methodology we employ was user centered design, where interviews with visitors take place about not only the topic, but their own specific needs and limitations as individuals. In our polling, differences between economic backgrounds were most apparent, particularly in whether the visitor (students in this case) were able to visit with family or as a larger school group, and whether online content was available outside the museum visit.

Brainstorming period topics

• mutagenesis vs plasmid design
• Metaphors: panning for gold from randomness, genes as building block approach
• The implication of color hunting as a goal and uniqueness of color as a target was the most broadly accepted, though it needs to be grounded in a real-life metaphor.

Proposed prototypes from initial research

• The lab space should be mobile and able to operate in both a lab context and on a street
• The hands-on synbio component, transformation will be the visitor’s contribution, and provide a valuable piece of data the whole result
• The activity should continue the story of transforming bacteria and tie it to another activity focused on design

Evaluation of our approach

Review of our design approach led us to divide our question into two aspects.

• Question 1: Was the demographic balance goal successful?
• Question 2: Was the process of creating social metrics for prototyping more helpful or more distracting in ultimately creating the most engaging exhibit?

Initial results are promising and lay a groundwork for further development. The relatively small number and variability of responses does not allow us to draw quantitative conclusions (link to response grid), but they do give us ideas to prototype further.

The irony of pursuing underrepresented demographics in museum goers in a museum was not lost on us, and is one of the main reasons behind the mobility of the lab. When the mobile lab and interactive are hardened for off-site use. We will be able to use our methodology in different settings and, along with evaluation of e.pixels itself, we can also assess its impact on whether exhibits and programming like it would affect the public’s impression of our museum and their intention to visit for the first time.

Results

Our iterative, user centered, design approach is widely used in industry and research. And is a useful tool for aligning arbitrary technology with real needs and goals. Framing an iGEM project as an activity for lay audiences can easily succumb to the research goals or chosen gene construct.

Though broad social questions are difficult to definitively answer, assessing the needs of target demographics and tracking progress, can be successful for gender balance in a predominantly male areas. Weeding out technology driven but potentially skewed early stage pilots, and keeping track of group demographics, and putting effort in achieving representative samples in test users if they are not achieved in normal sampling.