Team:Wellesley HCI/Notebook/KimberlyChang

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Wellesley HCI iGEM Team: Kimberly Chang

Kimberly's Notebook


Contents

May 29: First day of the summer session!

Orientation. Plan. Fill this in


Jun 6: A day in the wet lab

MIT reflection goes here

Jun 12: A day in the wet lab

BU day!

Jun 13 & 14: Brainstorming!!

Brainstorming reflection goes here

Jun 19: Demonstrating Paper Prototype

Wendy and I met with Orit to go over our paper prototype. Before meeting with her, we’d come up with different ideas for the installation to connect more directly with synthetic biology. One of these ideas was to create representations of ice buckets and petri dishes that users would then physically “place” the cubes into to cold shock or incubate the bacteria. We thought about using another Surface and possibly even the Microsoft tablet. However, after talking with Orit, we decided that these additional features might be cumbersome. Orit stressed that we needed to grab the attention of our users in about five seconds, so streamlining the interaction was really key. This meant that we needed to simplify the characteristics we gave our creatures and that we needed to get rid of our menu. We are most likely going to be sticking strictly to color as the trait that we are going to modify in order to simplify the interaction further. We are additionally going to move away from a “cute” aesthetic towards something more mature-looking in order to appeal to the more adult audience at iGEM. We discussed testing the prototype installation at Wellesley and also potentially at the Discovery Museum. For the next stage of the project, we need to think about affordance – basically customizing the cubes to distinguish them – and the aesthetics of the installation. My next task is to work on how the E. coli will look and start creating a short animation of the installation by Friday.