Team:Wellesley Desyne/Project Overview

Project Description

Synthetic biology is a multi-disciplinary field that requires a collaborative environment in order to engineer the complex biological systems of the future. To help create that environment, our team is designing software tools – tools that address specific technical synthetic biology challenges in order to ease synthetic biology research and increase its learnability. In addition, since synthetic biology is a new and emerging field, it is important to pay attention to how the public perceives such research. Careful attention is given to this as we create our applications. Eugenie is a multi-touch application that allows synthetic biologists to use the programming language Eugene without actually having to code. zTree makes use of zSpace, a holographic computing machine, to aid scientists in navigating and visualizing abstract data. zTree focuses on representing hierarchical data in an intuitive and interactive manner. Finally, Bac to the Future is an interactive web application that aims to communicate core concepts of synthetic biology to those who are nonscientists. As a human-computer interactions lab, our team tackles the challenges that synthetic biologists face while simultaneously applying human-computer interaction techniques to create intuitive tools and foster a more collaborative design environment.

---