Team:ETH Zurich/human/essay/adaptation

Going further

In this part, we analyze the method we used to answer our human practice question. Point by point, we will investigate what we used.

Survey

Internet diffusion allowed to have more than 800 answers.

We called for other iGEM team solidarity for the survey. The idea of winning a badge for the wiki was appealing to many of them. Every team could participate as much as time allowed it because we had a two-step badge (a colorful badge for 20 answers and a golden badge for 50 answers).

We did not define a target population. We were too ambitious. The data set we collected is strongly biased towards

students. It could be interesting to particularly design a survey concerning this part of the population.

Our goal was to understand people's point of view on complexity. Even if, in our survey, there were blank spaces people could use to express themselves, it would be interesting to use another way to draw a picture of complexity in today's world. One option could be to go out on streets and ask people on the streets to answer one question. "What is complexity for you?". This other method, who can be recorded, gives then a video or audio support to understate our survey study. It would be strongly dependent on the country of investigation but it could give some unexpected insights on the topic. Moreover, it would have been an occasion to arise awareness of the public on synthetic biology.

Interviews

First, we would like to thank every person that accepted to answer our questions.

As one of our goal was to investigate how complexity is taken into account in different fields, interviews seemed to be the best way to get a broad overview on different fields. We achieved to get

A training to be a good interviewer could be an option to improve our method.

Outreach

Litterature Work