Silver

AREA Framework

The AREA Framework

This year we have implemented the AREA framework created by Professor Richard Owen. The framework was introduced to us by Dr Sarah Hartley, a social scientist at the University of Exeter. We wanted to use it to ensure that our project incorporates RRI (Responsible Research and Innovation).

AREA stands for Anticipate, Reflect, Engage and Act. Initially we considered this framework to be a rigid structure and were following the steps in order of Anticipate, Reflect, Engage and Act. However, we realised that it may not be suitable to do this; a meeting with Dr Sarah Hartley confirmed this. For our project, it was important to work fluidly with the framework depending on the outcome of meetings and the progression of the project.

Anticipate:

This involves continuous consideration of how you want the innovation you are designing and introducing into society to shape the future of society. Its important to question in what ways you want your research to change the future and pay close attention to the associated risk and implication on society and the environment.

It was important to gain information from stakeholders to help our understanding of the specific impacts and then have internal meetings to discuss how we can tackle these. It also served a useful starting point for reflection

Reflect:

Reflection is about considering the motivations behind our project to ensure the purpose of the research is fully understood. Its where research thinking about how the evolution of the project has changed and most importantly ensure that the research and innovation is still in line with the societal issue you want it to solve.

Meetings with stakeholders often stimulated reflection, however we generally found reflection was an internal process that allowed us to make educated decisions. Reflection often allowed us to consider the broader questions surrounding our project.

Engage:

Reflection often makes it easier to then identify relevant stakeholders. This part of the framework is about identifying and communicating with stakeholders who have expertise in the areas in required to influence your research. A wide range of stakeholders and publics should be involved to get a full range of perspectives.

We found it important to find out as much as we could around our chosen research area before identifying the stakeholders who would be able to provide us with the knowledge we required. Maintaining a dialogue with stakeholders to ensure we continually engaged with them to utilise their expertise to help shape our project.

Act:

To act is to take on board advice from stakeholders and actively use this information to influence and make changes to the project. Its important for researchers to remain flexible in their response, considering all views before change the trajectory of the project

Throughout our project our decisions were highly influenced by direction gained from both academics and stakeholders.

Our Use of the Framework

The first two weeks of our project were spent planning potential ideas for our project. The projects we came up with were always related to solving a large scale issue, and the majority of these were environmental issues caused by humanity. Reflecting on this we established that we are a team with members that would like to devote their attention to improving the world. Further reflection led to us believing this may not be the case as it was easier to think of ideas for solving issues from our own experience, which are dominated by issues we are exposed to. Whereas it was much harder to understand the issues faced within synthetic biology, due to our team lack of exposure to this, which meant that we struggled to have confidence in any ideas that followed the foundational advance or measurement tracks.

While researching other projects by reading papers around the field and looking at previous iGEM teams, we engaged with academics at the University of Exeter who are in fields we were interested in doing a project on. We would meet with each academic as a group, first explaining who we are and then asking them questions about their work and the role a synthetic biology project could have in this field. Doing this meant that we could anticipate the need for such a project and the feasibility within the short time frame. Using this information we acted by making a judgement on whether the project idea should be researched further. This led us to decide that we wanted to modify type I pili for the purpose of bioremediation of contaminated water. Making this decision required reflection to ensure that the motivations of each team member was met by the project. We decided that the project followed our motivations as it conformed with our desire to look for a solution to an environmental issue. This was satisfied as we felt that the local issue surrounding the Consolidated Mines was a typical situation faced by many abandoned mining sites around the world, so solving these issues could prove very rewarding to us personally. The most important factor to ensure our individual motivations were met is that each member in our team was satisfied that particular parts of the project would suit their skills set or provide the opportunity for learning the skills they wanted to gain from iGEM.