Team:WHU-China/Public Engagement
Public Engagement
To confirm that our work is responsible and good for the world, we actively contact with the public. For one thing, we broadcast the conception of synthetic biology. For another thing, we advertised our project and collected a lot of advice from the public!
Public Social Media
We have created our official team account on WeChat, QQ and Weibo (three major social media in China). We put our experiment updates onthese social media. We also update some interesting knowledge related to synthetic biology to help the public better understand what we are doing right now. Meanwhile, the mutual public platform allows us to receive timely feedback from the public on our project so that we can effectively improve our project accordingly.
Questionnaire
We distributed 297 questionnaires to the public and analyzed the results to learn about the public's view on synthetic biology and our project in which we use E. coli to repair silk artifacts. In order to make our questionnaire more convincing and effective, respondents were chosen randomly. Through the questionnaires, we got two main points.
1.What is the public opinion on our project?
For applying the field synthetic biology method to the culture relics repair , most people (82.49%) support us, a small number of people (14.14%) hold a neutral attitude, and very few people (3.37%) object to it. This result shows that our project is highly recognized by the public and is regarded by the public as a valuable project which can make great contributions to our society.
2.Why did we organize an exhibition?
In the survey, we found that more than half of the subjects (55.56%) were able to accept the in-situ repair to some extent so
that the in-situ method seems to be kind of acceptable. We also noticed the fact that 36.36% of subjects have a neutral attitude
towards in-situ method. In order to better understand this data, we further did correlation analysis between this data and people’s
understanding of synthetic biology. The correlation analysis result showed that
Exhibition
The results of questionnaire enlightened us to make a presentation to let the public learn more about our project so that we can get more pertinent evaluation. Thus we held an exhibition to show the design conception, the 3D model of hardware and especially the BC reinforcement effect of the old clothes that we collected form the public.
The story of ‘Jiu(舊) ’
The Chinese hieroglyphic character for "Jiu" features a bird shaped like a high crown perched in a dilapidated nest. Birds love old nests, people love old things. Every family has old clothes, and the stories of families passed on silently from generation to generation, are buried in them.
Although, the objects of our project are those delicate silk relics, we hope to expansion the application of the BC to reinforce those old clothes that bearing precious memories. Thus we hold this ‘Old Clothes Restoration’ exhibition in Wuhan University to show our achievements to the public and collect their opinions upon our project directly.
The ‘Old Clothes Restoration’ exhibition
The activity was divided into 3 sessions:
Collection session
We handed out leaflets and published advertising articles to the public a week in advance for collecting old objects. As these old objects might be quite meaningful, we informed them that we would spray BC on them for reinforcement in advance. We collected 14 pieces of old objects in total including old overall, baby suits, handkerchief and so on.
Reinforcement session
After collecting the old clothes, we reinforced them in the laboratory for 5 days, and observed them via optical microscopy.
Exhibition session
We displayed our exhibition in the playground of our school. Our exhibition attracted quantities of students, teachers and passersby and we received extensive and positive feedback from them. We held a message board to collect people's feedback, people had actively left their opinions on it.
Through the exhibition, we showed our project to the public and collected many opinions and suggestions from the visitors. Most of them were interested in our work and praised our behavior on cultural relics restoration. An old lady even expressed that she was willing to let us reinforce a hat belonging to her late husband. It gave us a lot of motivation!
Footprint
China is an ancient civilization with a long history and splendid culture. We hope to learn more history knowledge through such an opportunity. Thus we held an activity called ‘Footprint’. The team members were encouraged to visit museums during summer vocations. In addition to edifying the cultural heritage of ourselves, through this activity, we also investigated the preservation of exhibits in museums in various places of China, so as to explore the necessity of functionalization part of our design.
