BioBright presented at the Better World by Design 2017 conference about challenging the status quo in design and science. "Biological research is in trouble. It can take decades for lifesaving drugs to come to market. Possible cures slip by unnoticed, lost in mountains of data. How can we break this status quo? What would you do if you were faced with this design challenge? We'll share our strategies for understanding complex scientific processes and creating innovative visual designs for the lab of the future."

1. Stay In Your Lane:
Challenging the status quo in science
William Barry Mandi Cai Jen Weber
Better World by Design - September 24th, 2017 1

2. Take time to learn
about the problem
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3. Which cat appears most frequently?
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4. Time’s up!
A B C D E
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5. Guess the # of cells between 450 and 500
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6. Time’s up!
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7. Guess the # of cells between 800 and 915
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8. Time’s up!
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9. Drowning in data
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10. Biology and the
28 billion
dollar problem $10

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22. Challenge your own
assumptions
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32. Throw stuff at the
wall and see what
sticks 332

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39. Come up with the
right questions and
validate hypotheses 439

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What are our observations?
What patterns are there in
our observations?
Which problems do we
want to solve?

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What patterns are there in
our observations?
Which problems do we
want to solve?
What are our observations?

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Hypotheses Priority Level
Users want to visualize data in a way that
is related to their workflow.
High
Users want a statistical view (histogram,
st-dev, averages, t-test, etc.).
Medium
Users will want to undo their changes. Low

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46. ?
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48. Tap into your past
knowledge and
experience 548

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51. Test outside the box
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54. Power through
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55. The tools and approaches we tried:
Data Vis textbooks
Google Charts
Bokeh
D3
Adobe UXD
Sketch
User Testing
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56. The tools and approaches we tried:
Data Vis textbooks
Google Charts
Bokeh
D3
Adobe UXD
Sketch
User Testing
Google Sheets
Excel
Agile
Design Sprint
Simple Statistics
Jupyter Notebook
User Interviews
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57. The tools and approaches we tried:
Data Vis textbooks
Google Charts
Bokeh
D3
Adobe UXD
Sketch
User Testing
Google Sheets
Excel
Agile
Design Sprint
Simple Statistics
Jupyter Notebook
User Interviews
Principle
Ember.js
Crazy 8’s
Lightning Talks
How Might We’s
Python
Pandas/Numpy
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58. Challenge the status
quo because you can
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59. Resources
Google Design Sprint Kit - https://designsprintkit.withgoogle.com/methods/
Inkscape/GIMP - free image editors that run on Linux
Codewars - a great resource for improving coding skills - www.codewars.com
The people around you
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60. We’d love to hear from you!
Jen Weber
jen@biobright.org
Twitter @jwwweber
William Barry
williambarry@outlook.com
mrwilliambarry.com
Mandi Cai
mandi@biobright.org
www.mandilicai.com
BioBright
www.biobright.com
Twitter @BioBright_org
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