Team:The Tech Museum/Summary

Community Engagement

Methods and Approach
Evaluation of approach
The general approach we took to tackle our project question was to try to develop an interactive exhibit in which visitors are involved in both making and analyzing multi-colored bacteria. Overall, this approach allowed us to effectively answer our overarching question. We successfully produced a fully functioning and very promising first prototype of a hands-on exhibit that engages the public in a synthetic biology experience.

We successfully randomized bacteria colony color with our tri-color plasmid pools. Additionally, we were able to optimize the transformation conditions of bacteria with this plasmid pool to easily incorporate this new tools into the current museum wetlab experience. Additionally, the software we created could easily be used by museum visitors to quantify bacteria colony number and color. We were able to generate and have visitors add to an aggregate data set showing the frequency distribution of hues generated. Visitors responded positively to this experience of seeing how their data contributed to and modified the group data. Overall, people thought that the fluorescent multi-colored bacteria were very interesting and understood the basic concepts of how they were made and their contribution to our iGEM team

One important aspect of our project was that we wanted to allow people of all ages and with no biology background to participate and actually become part of our museum iGEM team. The final design of our project successfully did that. More than 60 experiments were run on the museum floor with visitors. These visitors ranged in age from as young as 5 years old to adults. Everyone was able to participate and complete the activities, which was a major achievement. These different ages, they likely got different levels of understanding out of their experience. The smallest kids mostly just liked the glowing colors, and the adults were curious to get deeper explanations about the biology underlying the generation of random bacteria colors.

Advantages and limitations of method:
Advantages include:
Ease of use, even small kids can participate
Visual appeal for all audiences
Ability to integrate this directly into established museum wetlab, which we know works and visitors love
Limitations include:
Only one visitor can participate at a time, so kids get impatient
Software is still needs some debugging, speed
Currently, explanation of underlying biology is very minimal and simplistic. This works for kids, but need more for older kids and adults.
Scanning station could be more interactive, again, mostly for older visitors who want to feel like they did more than just put the plate in the imaging booth.

Management of Limitations:
awesomness

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.

Feedback Form Did you enjoy the activity? Yes / No
Do you understand how the colored bacteria were made? Yes / No
Would you like to learn more about engineering bacteria? Yes / No
Favorite part? Least favorite part?
How could we improve the activity?
If you could put any DNA into bacteria, what would you make them do?
Thanks for your feedback! It helps us develop better museum experiences!!

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
Addressing gender, economic background and age diversity
The Tech’s approach to interactive 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.

Our community 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 disparities balance 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 can invite adults to participate more in the activities, either alone or with their children.

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.

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.

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 design level it seems obvious to track all measures of test groups, but in practice, aggregating small amounts of test data to pick one direction over another is common practice.

Two common approaches at The Tech is 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 employed was user centered design, where interviews with visitors take place about not only the topic, but their own needs and limitations is the focus. 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.