Team:Hong Kong HKUST/human practice/start-up kit/report

The pie chart above represents the percentage of projects done for each type. While each team has a different way to refer to their projects, all the projects were classified into 17 categories for the sake of this analysis.

Talks seem to be the majority of the types done in the past. 288 talks were delivered from year 2008 to 2013, taking 21% of the entire projects. 11% of the projects were performed in the form of survey, becoming the second largest portion. Workshops and Articles were the third biggest contributors, scoring 145 and 143 times respectively, taking 10% each of the entire projects. Books and Business were the least popular types, only 26 and 22 of them done in the past six years.

Though the results were somewhat expected, the question why talks, surveys and workshops are much more popularly done still needed to be answered. The most likely reason would be that these are the types of projects that involve direct interaction with the public. The sole purpose of human practice is to expose the idea of synthetic biology out to the society, and the three types mentioned above fulfil the mission in a most obvious way.

Teams introduce their projects by holding conferences, observe and analyse people’s knowledge and perspective on synthetic biology by conducting surveys, and provide the opportunity for people to witness their working environment and attain hands on experience by giving lab tours and various workshops. Moreover, in order to discuss the current development and future applications of synthetic biology, teams write articles and post it on websites to allow interested groups to gain access and obtain knowledge.

In contrast, types like books and business seems not yet fully developed comparatively. Similar reason can be implied. It seems harder to get in touch with the public by writing and publishing a handbook or children’s book, since the number of copies made by each team limits the access. Though constructing a business plan may provide a base ground for future introduction of their product, it makes little contribution to the society in a short term. Nevertheless, all these types should not be discouraged, for they may have dramatic impact in the future.

It can also be concluded from the graph that Latin America, compared to other regions, have higher interest in holding workshops. Europe on the other hand, shows a higher percentage in using social media platforms as a form of Human Practice project. The teams in Asia are more comfortable with conducting survey than the other regions. The European and North American teams shows to have higher consideration in writing an article comparatively than Asia and Latin America.

When it comes to other types of projects such as business, books, visit investigation, game, video and art, there cannot be a definite conclusion which can affect the whole point of this section. This is mainly due to the low percentage or amount of these type of projects being made. So to wrap it up, the teams in each regions have their own preference in how to deliver their human practice projects.