BacPack: tangibles for biology learning

What it is. A tangible tabletop installation that lived inside the BioDesign Studio exhibition at The Tech Interactive, and a two-paper academic study published in ACM’s TEI ‘17 and ISS ‘16 proceedings on the role of tangible interaction in public synthetic-biology learning. The academic work was led by Orit Shaer’s HCI Lab at Wellesley, with co-authors Anastasia Loparev, Lauren Westendorf, Madeleine Flemings, Jeffrey Cho, and Anja Scholze. I am co-author on both as the Tech Interactive partner.

The problem behind it. Synthetic-biology education for the public was almost always either too watered down to teach the actual design grammar, or too lecture-shaped to hold a museum visitor’s attention. Tangible interfaces had been studied in HCI for years but had not been deployed at scale on a real museum floor with real synthetic-biology content. BacPack was the experiment.

What I did. On the Tech Interactive side, I ran the museum-installation engineering and the in-the-room operations: how the table fit the floor plan, how the staff trained to host it, what a visitor encounter looked like from beginning to end. The Wellesley lab led the academic methodology and analysis. We met in the middle on the design of the tangible pieces and how the simulation responded to them. It was a real research collaboration, not a pass-through.