Erik Pukinskis
Designing For Scientists
Goals
The purpose of this project was to conduct a long term open ended design project aimed at helping scientists. The project began without any more specific goals.
Progress
Several months of observations were conducted in five different biology labs at Indiana University. Interviews were conducted with faculty, post-graduate researchers and students. The purpose of these observations was to help me understand how science labs function and try to identify places where new interactive technologies could make tasks easier or allow scientists to do things that were previously impossible.
Using these observations, I constructed a network of insights about the function of science labs and the scientific process. From these insights I then brainstormed a wide range of design concepts that could address scientist's needs. Finally I created explanatory prototypes for each concept, ranging from sketches and storyboards to video prototypes.
I also conducted observations in a children's science museum and made an exhaustive collection of science toys, but this design thread was not included in the final design space.
Product
The product of this work is an interactive representation of the design space, created in Macromedia Flash. This covers a wide range of biology tasks, from field observations to imaging tasks to genomics.
Results
Because this was a design project, rather than a traditional research project, the results are the catalog of informal observations and insights I made. These are characterizations which can form the starting point for designs, but can not be relied on as facts. More thorough design research is required to turn these into bankable theories.
- Science moves fast. Often the results of an experiment can push a line of research in a completely different direction, requiring new experimental procedures, new analysis tools, new external information sources, or some combination of both. This makes it very difficult for software to keep up with the needs of scientists.
- Most data is lost. Lab notebooks and field journals mostly end up on a shelf. It is extremely difficult to look up old information, particularly if the researcher who originally notated it has left the lab, a common phenomenon. Often researchers are the only ambassadors to their data.
- Researchers are pragmatists. When tools are lacking, researchers employ time-consuming work-arounds to get their work done. They often lack the time necessary to constantly learn new computational tools, and will do things by hand rather than wrangle software. When software doesn't work, they work around it or they shift their focus to a different line of research.