“Short on time and big on ideas”: Perspectives from Lab Members on DIYBio Work in Community Biolabs

Abstract

DIYbio challenges the status quo by positioning laboratory biology work outside of traditional institutions. HCI has increasingly explored the DIYbio movement, but we lack insight into sites of practice such as community biolabs. Therefore, we gathered data on eleven community biolabs by interviewing sixteen lab managers and members. These labs represent half of identifed organizations in scope worldwide. Participants detailed their practices and motivations, outlining the constraints and opportunities of their community biolabs. We found that lab members conducted technically challenging project work with access to high-end equipment and professional expertise. We found that the unique nature of biowork exacerbated challenges for cooperative work, partially due to the particular time sensitivities of work with living organisms. Building on our fndings, we discuss how community biolab members are creating new approaches to laboratory biology and how this has design implications for systems that support non-traditional settings for scientifc practice. CCS CONCEPTS• Human-centered computing → Human computer interaction (HCI).

Current landscape and future directions of synthetic biology in South America

“…Outside of the academic context, the open hardware movement and SynBio in Latin America have a very heterogeneous development that addresses different needs and scopes and, in many cases, cannot be entirely separated from academic organizations 82 . Two significant interests could be centered on developing biotechnological tools: 1) Open-source hardware and 2) SynBio components 83,84,85,86,87,88 (Federici et al, 2013;Lewens, 2015). One of these emergencies is constructing scientific equipment in a region that is chronically scarce or difficult to obtain.…”