Human Practices

CHRIS IS WRITING A NEW ONE IN THE GOOGLE DOC. BE PATIENT AND IT'LL BE THERE SOON! Our story this summer was a tumultuous adventure of consultation and rebuilding. We had the initial idea of building a pathogenic E. coli detecting system in the early part of the year. Taking it from a mere idea to an actual system with a prototype took lots of communication and even more PCRs.

Tracking back to the beginning of the year in our home province of Alberta we had just seen another enormous recall of beef that was contaminated with E. coli O157. It had resulted in many deaths and even more cases of illnesses, and showed to us that the industry might have a challenge we could fit into. We did a bit of research into the industry and got a feeling for how current methods worked on paper for detecting E. coli. But to get a real sense of how the industry works we decided to talk with people who are actively involved in it every day. The first person we spoke to was Bob Church, a rancher in Alberta.

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Informed Design

Early on in our project we realized that we really needed to understand how the beef industry worked and who all the players were within it. We needed to understand the culture of the industry. To do so we reached out the first link we could think of, our families. Where did we get our meat from? There is nothing more personal than the food we eat and understanding the last step in the long chain tells us a lot about the first step. Speaking of that first step...

Safety

While designing this project we also realized there was a very real concern from a safety perspective. The organisms we are targeting are listed as pathogens and can make people very sick. Thus we took a number of design considerations when building our technology.