Practicing DIYBiology In An HCI Setting
Piyum Fernando, Matthew Pandelakis, Stacey Kuznetsov · 2016
Alongside an expanding community of non-professional biologists, DIYbio is beginning to emerge as a fledgling sub- domain of HCI. However, this emerging subdomain is yet to be in the focal point of a long-term investigation to identify the challenges and opportunities of designing interactive systems and tools to facilitate biological practices outside of professional setups. As the first step towards this direc- tion, we carried out an autoethnographic study to practice DIYbiology, by setting up a functional DIYbio space inside our HCI design studio. In this paper we reflect on our auto- biographical experiences in practicing DIYbiology inside our lab space and discuss the challenges and opportunities for further HCI research in this particular subdomain.