Team:UC San Diego/HP/Overview
Human Practices
Overview
One of the key driving forces of this year’s iGEM team has been our dedication to both quantity and quality, especially when it comes to Human Practices. As a team, we believe that Human Practices is an integral part of a successful project, because science is too often done in a vacuum, without input from those around us. Thus, we sought to change that culture for ourselves and all future iGEM teams.
This year, we implemented two frameworks for Human Practices: one for Public Engagement, one for Integrated Human Practices. The first one, BLUE(R) also includes a holistic rubric designed by the UCSD team that can be used by any team to determine the effectiveness of their approach. The second one helps streamline thought processes and provide a logical flow to your thought process because often times, teams will conduct a number of interviews but not really show how they changed their idea because of that particular interaction.
Too often, Integrated Human Practices and Public Engagement are put as two separate categories, but our team managed to use one to guide the other on several different occasions.
HP Silver
In this section, we used the RED Framework to highlight our work in education , public policy , public perception, and intellectual property discussion . These were just a selection of activities that our team performed, and a more extensive documentation can be found in the Integrated Human Practices section of this website.
Integrated Human Practices
Using the RED Framework, our team conducted 12 interviews and integrated feedback from beginning to end. Click here to learn more about each of the steps, and meet some of the very interesting people along our journey.
Public Engagement
We also used the BLUE(R) Protocol to guide our Public Engagement activities for this year’s team. We managed to come up with several unique ideas, including a textbook and partnering with a Northern California nonprofit to help expand our impact, started a nonprofit of our own to help enact public policy change in cleaner energy alternatives, and even managed to pitch our project idea to venture capitalists at a summit in Southern California.
