# “Short on time and big on ideas”: Perspectives from Lab Members on DIYBio
Work in Community Biolabs

Orlando de Lange  University of WashingtonSeattle, WAUSA<EMAIL_ADDRESS>,  Kellie
Dunn  University of WashingtonSeattle, WAUSA<EMAIL_ADDRESS>and  Nadya Peek
University of WashingtonSeattle, WAUSA<EMAIL_ADDRESS>
(2022)

###### Abstract.

DIYbio challenges the status quo by positioning laboratory biology work
outside of traditional institutions. HCI has increasingly explored the DIYbio
movement, but we lack insight into sites of practice such as community
biolabs. Therefore, we gathered data on eleven community biolabs by
interviewing sixteen lab managers and members. These labs represent half of
identified organizations in scope worldwide. Participants detailed their
practices and motivations, outlining the constraints and opportunities of
their community biolabs. We found that lab members conducted technically
challenging project work with access to high-end equipment and professional
expertise. We found that the unique nature of biowork exacerbated challenges
for cooperative work, partially due to the particular time sensitivities of
work with living organisms. Building on our findings, we discuss how community
biolab members are creating new approaches to laboratory biology and how this
has design implications for systems that support non-traditional settings for
scientific practice.

DIYbio, community biolab, laboratory science, DIY, community labs, citizen
science

††copyright: iw3c2w3††journalyear: 2022††doi:
10.1145/1122445.1122456††conference: Designing Interactive Systems 2022; June
03–05, 2022; Virtual††booktitle: Designing Interactive Systems 2022††price:
15.00††isbn: 978-1-4503-XXXX-X/18/06††ccs: Human-centered computing Human
computer interaction (HCI)

Figure 1. Biosafety cabinet, pipette, and materials for a DIYbio project in a
community biolab.

[A person stands next to a biosafety cabinet in a community biolab.]The
biosafety cabinet is wide and has a glass front. Inside of the cabinet is a
pipette tool and containers of biological materials. Next to the cabinet, a
person wearing blue disposable gloves is holding a spray bottle.

##  1\. Introduction

Professional laboratory biology research is is a powerful system for
generating novel technologies, though one that some have argued will
inevitably be used to further the destructive, short-term interests of those
in positions of power (Crouch, 1990). Donna Haraway, in discussion with
synthetic biologist Drew Endy (Haraway and Endy, 2019), entertains the idea
that those wishing to create an alternative, more socially just,
technoscientific future may find hope in throwing their resources behind those
who are ”staying with the trouble”. Rather than attempting to shut
biotechnology down (Crouch, 1990), she argues for strengthening the
communities who are ”telling better stories”. She offers, ”Biology is at least
two different things: it’s the historical discourse of biological knowledge
making, and it’s the biological world, which isn’t the same thing. […] this
[biological] knowledge-making apparatus, which tells a story about itself, is
separating nature from culture, studying nature separately from human politics
and religion and the rest. I know there’s a grain of truth in that story, but
there’s also a huge amount of self-deception because the history of biology is
the history of human beings engaging the world with technologies and the
projects of knowing.” Instead of separating biology from its cultural context,
she argues for understanding them as inextricably linked (Hadfield and
Haraway, 2019).

Biological knowledge-making is dominated by professionals working within
siloed institutions. The barriers to laboratory biology work are particularly
high, since practitioners require a dedicated space and specialist equipment
and materials, including organisms and biomaterials, in addition to technical
expertise. However, _community biolabs_ , the subject of this work, have
emerged as sites where individuals are invited to engage in work with the
world of organisms and biomaterials, lowering the barriers by providing space
and equipment. We are interested in how community biolabs are taking a new
look at the social possibilities of laboratory biology knowledge, methods, and
equipment.

Community biolabs are independent not-for-profit spaces for biology work
(Kean, 2011), as well as being social organizations that support the users of
the spaces as well as, in most cases, broader education and outreach work
(Scheifele and Burkett, 2016). Each community biolab is independent and
unique, though they are generally considered in association with the wider
DIYbio movement (Landrain et al., 2013), and they have often been referred to
as ”DIYbio labs” (Landrain et al., 2013). We have chosen the term ”community
biolab” for this paper in the absence of any one dominant name, though we note
that ”community lab”, ”biohackspace” and ”biomakerspace” are all additional
terms used within and outside these various organizations.

DIYbio is a term popularized by a group of open biotechnology advocates and
community organizers in the Boston, MA area in 2008 (Tocchetti, 2014) and
promoted via the DIYbio.org website and forum (Landrain et al., 2013; Meyer
and Vergnaud, 2020). Since then the term has been used far more broadly, often
interchangeably or in conversation with the term biohacker (Meyer, 2020). In
the years after the launch of DIYbio.org in 2008, community biolab spaces were
launched in the US and internationally (Landrain et al., 2013; DIYbiosphere,
2021). DIYbio has been suggested, among other things, as a movement to forge
“bottom-up” (Keulartz and van den Belt, 2016) pathways to knowledge production
and technology creation, as well as a movement to critique institutional
technoscience (Kera, 2017), or both at once (Tocchetti and Aguiton, 2015).
Unlike institutional technoscience, DIYbio tends to embrace the aesthetic
qualities of laboratory biology practices, recognizing the meaning and value
these qualities bring to biological knowledge making and blurring the lines
between bioscience and bioart (Keulartz and van den Belt, 2016; Wilbanks,
2017).

Söderberg and Delfanti (2015) argue that the ”hacker mind-set” has extended
from computer software to new domains, including electronics, hardware, and
biology. They argue that ”hackerspaces” and ”makerspaces” are places of
emancipatory promise: where tools and technology can be reverse engineered and
repurposed in the name of open source hardware or DIYbio. We value critiques
of maker culture (Ames, 2018; Ames et al., 2014) and critiques of the
repurposing of maker culture by institutions and governments (Lindtner, 2015).
These lines of critique should and have been extended to DIYbio — Keulartz and
van den Belt (2016) explore the ethical ambivalence within DIYbio, including
its potential to challenge but also to reinforce the norms of ”BIG bio” and
the ”commodification of all aspects of life”. However, despite valid
criticism, we also believe that makerspaces and community biolabs can provide
”utopian glimmers” of collaborations and partnerships that do not uphold a
problematic status quo (Lindtner et al., 2016). In addition, we argue that the
material practice of biological knowledge-making is markedly different than
that of digital fabrication and hardware manufacturing. Therefore, we see
value in studying community biolabs, and furthermore understanding
distinctions between community biolabs and makerspaces.

Martin (2015) argues that the maker movement comprises 1.) tools such as rapid
prototyping equipment and microcontroller platforms 2.) community
infrastructure such as in-person spaces and events and 3.) a mindset of
playfulness and exploration. This definition of the maker movement prioritizes
making _things_ over making knowledge. We believe we need a more in-depth
understanding of how people are taking on projects of biological knowledge-
making, and therefore seek to understand the specifics of DIYbio and the
spaces in which it is practiced. Furthermore, this definition of the maker
movement includes the myriad makerspaces that are part of academic
institutions or corporate labs. Within DIYbio practice, the dominant sites are
_non_ -institutional settings such as independent community biolabs (that are
the focus of this study) or home labs and artists’ studios.

Figure 2. Six of the eleven community bio labs included in our survey. Each of
these lab spaces show setups typical of molecular biology laboratory practice,
including workbenches, specialized equipment, and organized storage for
chemicals and materials. While they range in size from a warehouse to a small
corner of a room, they are overall smaller than comparable makerspaces,
reflecting that the scale of work performed is often at the micro- and nano
scale. Clockwise from top left: BUGSS, Counter Culture Labs, Cambridge
Biomakespace, Hive Biolab, Open Science Network, SoundBio Lab.

[A collage of six photos of community biolab spaces.]On the top left: a
basement room with equipment on long work benches. Top right: four people are
meeting in a large space with lots of equipment under a banner that reads
”Citizens for Science, Science for Citizens”. Middle right: a corner of a lab
with shelves on the walls and workbenches. Bottom right: four people wearing
lab coats are having a meeting in a small room with tidy equipment and
supplies. Bottom left: a group of people work gather around a table with
project work, surrounded by shelving and boxes. Middle left: a brightly
painted room with several work benches storing equipment and supplies.

DIYbio has been highlighted as not only a productive subject of study, but
also as a new area of HCI research practice (Fernando et al., 2016). The
specific DIYbio practices of bio art (Asgarali-Hoffman and Hamidi, 2021;
Hamidi et al., 2021; Kuznetsov et al., 2012) and open source laboratory
hardware (Fernando and Kuznetsov, 2020) have been explored in HCI research.
Microbes themselves have been promoted as novel design materials (Barati et
al., 2021) or as living computers with which HCI researchers should be engaged
in developing new conceptions of—and tools for—active design (Pataranutaporn
et al., 2020). We are interested in supporting the exploration of the possible
intersections of HCI and DIYbio. We argue that a grounded understanding of the
places in which DIYbio practitioners are already working and the challenges
and opportunities of work in those spaces can inform future HCI research.

The practices encompassed within DIYbio draw largely from those of biology
research laboratories. Such laboratories tend to be technology-dense sites
with workflows requiring materials to be moved between multiple computer-
controlled machines as well as relying on computational data analysis and
software tools to facilitate project planning and management. Novel approaches
to the design of research tools for biology laboratories have been explored in
the context of HCI (Tabard et al., 2012; Mackay et al., 2002; Hu et al., 2015;
Hincapié-Ramos et al., 2010, 2011). In their 2012 paper Kuznetsov and
colleagues (Kuznetsov et al., 2012) lay out a vision for systems design
research that engages with DIYbio from a range of stances. They suggest that
novel interactive systems within DIYbio contexts can both provide new
opportunities for project work while also being a material exploration of what
DIYbio means as a technosocial movement. We argue that a grounded
understanding of the places in which DIYbio practitioners are already working
and the challenges and opportunities of work in those spaces can inform such
systems design research. We are particularly motivated to inform research into
the design of systems that can aid DIYbio practitioners in achieving their
diverse goals, but we also believe that our empirical research into community
biolabs will provide a useful foundation for a range of possible HCI research
questions.

We seek to understand the conditions and constraints faced by those pursuing
sustained work in community biolabs. In particular, we investigate: 1.) What
equipment and materials are available in community biolabs and how are these
procured? 2.) What sort of project work are people pursuing and what
resources—labor or material—support project work? and 3.) What are the main
challenges faced by those working in community biolabs?

To address our research questions, we interviewed 16 participants affiliated
with 11 different community biolabs and supplemented these data with publicly
available material from lab websites. We surfaced a number of themes grouped
under ‘equipment, tools and materials’, and ‘work’. We found that community
biolabs are well-equipped for laboratory work, particularly molecular biology
work, largely thanks to donations of equipment and materials from professional
labs. Surprisingly, we found that time and effective means to coordinate group
work are far more limiting than money or equipment. While some DIYbio
practices involve people without professional training operating in low
resource settings primarily using DIY equipment (Tocchetti, 2014), that does
not seem a fitting characterization for community biolabs. The people we spoke
to were motivated by curiosity and a desire to learn as well as wanting to
contribute their knowledge and skills to their immediate community of co-
practitioners. Drawing on our findings, we discuss how community biolab
members are creating new approaches to laboratory biology work, how laboratory
equipment is procured and used in these spaces, and finally research
opportunities for systems that support collaborative work in non-traditional
settings for scientific practice.

##  2\. Background: Community Biolabs in context

Figure 3. An example community biolab team project workflow. This workflow
employs a variety of molecular biology techniques but is only a sample of the
wide array of required equipment, instruments, and materials as well as the
required knowledge and skills to make use of them effectively. To plan an
effective workflow, the community member must rely on domain knowledge to
choose appropriate timing, machine settings, chemical reaction mixes, etc.
Furthermore, the steps must be performed sequentially because each step relies
on the products of the previous step, and in some cases (clock icons) the time
between work sessions must be kept within certain limits. Living organisms
such as the bacterial cells used in this workflow tend to introduce time
sensitivities into biolab workflows. Data can be collected and analyzed at
only a few steps. A failure could occur at any step but there are only limited
opportunities to check for success since most processes of interest are
impossible to directly observe.

In the years following the launch of DIYbio.org in 2008, sociology of science
researchers have engaged critically with the ethical, political and
epistemological implications of DIYbio (Keulartz and van den Belt, 2016;
Delgado, 2013; Kera, 2017; Wilbanks, 2017; Tocchetti and Aguiton, 2015), while
articles in the magazine sections of peer-reviewed life science journals were
used to sound the alarm (Wolinsky, 2009) or sing the praises (Alper and
DeFrancesco, 2009; Kean, 2011) of the new approach to laboratory biology. A
number of studies have sought to provide information about the on-the-ground
state of the movement, for example by surveying its followers (Meyer and
Vergnaud, 2020; Grushkin, 2009) or the products of their work (Landrain et
al., 2013; Kera, 2012, 2017), or through ethnographic studies of DIYbio groups
(Kera, 2011; Roosth, 2017; Tocchetti, 2014; Kaiying and Lindtner, 2016). The
positionality of authors researching and writing about DIYbio varies with many
actively involved in DIYbio work or community organizing outside of their
academic research, and some articles have been published with this explicit
framing (Scheifele and Burkett, 2016). From 2013-2018 BioCoder (BioCoder,
2022) provided a platform for articles describing first hand reports of DIYbio
work and related articles.

In recent years, HCI researchers have begun to explore DIYbio, accepting its
latent invitation to re-imagine the interaction space of human and non-human
organisms with diverse machines and materials (Asgarali-Hoffman and Hamidi,
2021; Kuznetsov et al., 2015, 2012). This has involved studying DIYbio
practitioners operating outside of HCI (Asgarali-Hoffman and Hamidi, 2021) as
well as integrating DIYbio into HCI practice (Hamidi et al., 2021; Fernando et
al., 2016), and design research into systems that could support DIYbio work by
better meeting the interests and contexts of practitioners (Gome et al., 2019;
Fernando, 2019; Fernando and Kuznetsov, 2020) .

To the existing scholarship on DIYbio, we contribute findings on the
contemporary practices and challenges of work in community biolabs. Our
primary interest is to support DIYbio practitioners by informing relevant
systems design research, though our findings are likely to be of interest to
anyone with interests in the intersection of DIYbio and HCI. We provide here a
brief overview of the technoscientific background for community biolab work as
well as what is already known about these novel sites of practice.

###  2.1. From molecular biology to the modern DIYbio movement

Over the last 150 years DNA has increasingly moved to the center of the
science of biology, transitioning from a mysterious acidic substance inside
cells (Dahm, 2005) to not only the material out of which genes are constructed
in nature, but also out of which new genetic programs might be rationally
designed (Nielsen et al., 2016). Within the last 50 years, a number of
technological developments, including the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR)
(Bartlett and Stirling, 2003), improved DNA sequencing, and practical,
affordable DNA synthesis, have transformed laboratory biology. Molecular
biology, in which DNA, RNA, and proteins are centered as laboratory materials
and as a conceptual framework to explain life, is today a ubiquitous
methodology within professional laboratory biology, whether in academia or
industry (Morange, 2000).

The contemporary DIYbio movement was inspired by the ideas of 21st century
synthetic biology (Tocchetti, 2014; Roosth, 2017; Delgado, 2013; Simons, 2021;
Meyer and Vergnaud, 2020) and was launched by individuals working in the
Boston area, a center for synthetic biology research and industry (Nair,
2009). Synthetic biology is a movement within professional laboratory biology,
promoted initially by engineers and computer scientists who pursue the
aspirational and problematized vision of rationally redesigning organisms,
supported by the use of machine metaphors for genetic and cellular systems
(Roosth, 2017). Roosth (2017) sees DIYbio drawing on the same tendencies of
synthetic biology to pursue ”intercalation of making and knowing”, that is, to
assert that building something is the same as knowing it. Indeed, we found
that common workflows in community biolabs did incorporate standard molecular
biology and synthetic biology techniques, as illustrated in the example
workflow in Figure 3. The ongoing relationship between DIYbio and synthetic
biology is also evidenced in the plenary lecture delivered by leading
professional synthetic biology researcher Drew Endy at the 2020 Global
Community Biosummit (Summit, 2020), an important organizing event for DIYbio
practitioners. Synthetic biology has been critiqued for promoting a “molecular
chauvinism” that promotes technological solutions and devalues the role of
relationships among humans and to the non-human world (Haraway and Endy,
2019). To some extent, following a different path, DIYbio brings the making of
life into a domestic and personal perspective, and encourages a “crafty
approach to biology” centering the human practitioner as they work to achieve
”epistemic knowledge … generated through practical proficiency” (Roosth,
2017). The contemporary DIYbio movement was imagined by its early
practitioners and organizers as simultaneously fantastically expansive in its
ambitions of engineering life and bringing biotechnology to everyone, as well
as being small-scale and artisanal and occupied much more with the experience
of working with organisms and biomaterials than with the technical outcomes of
this work (Roosth, 2017).

In transferring things from the domain of the professional laboratory into new
contexts, DIYbio practitioners are challenging technoscientific norms. Cluck
(2015) found that DIYbio practitioners, as they create new spaces for their
work, are “re-assembling what constitutes the means of production of
scientific knowledge (a ”laboratory”)”. As such, the sites of DIYbio practice,
whether they be a private residence (Tocchetti, 2014), a non-biowork-oriented
hackerspace (Kuznetsov et al., 2015), or an artist’s studio (Hamidi et al.,
2021), are both laboratories of technoscientific work and, we suggest, the
“laboratories” in which distinctly DIYbio ways of doing and knowing are
explored. We believe that through studying these spaces and the work performed
there, we gain insight into what could be possible for science outside of
traditional institutions.

###  2.2. What do we know about community biolabs

In this study, we focus specifically on community biolabs among the sites of
DIYbio practice. These are not the only relevant sites, others notably include
home or garage labs (Alper and DeFrancesco, 2009; Wolinsky, 2009), as well as
highschool classrooms (Kafai et al., 2017), design studios (Kuznetsov et al.,
2018), and arguably online discussion forums (Meyer and Vergnaud, 2020).
”Community biolab”, while not a neologism of this paper, is the term we have
chosen to define a diverse array of physical spaces and the organizations
managing them. We offer a name and a working definition as a useful tool to
navigate the complex reality of independent spaces managed by individuals with
diverse practices and interests. Scheifele and Burkett (2016) suggest that
“community labs (biohacker spaces) [are] communal spaces that provide shared
instrumentation, […] reagents, management and communal projects for DIY-
biologists.” Wilbanks (2017) refers to “biohackerspaces” as “communal spaces…
for individuals to pursue scientific or biotechnological projects.” In this
paper, we define community biolabs as dedicated spaces equipped for laboratory
biology work, to which access is not restricted by qualification, that are
independent of any traditional scientific institution, and not solely intended
for commercial activity or structured educational offerings.

By centering sites of practice in our interviews with practitioners, we
contribute an exploration of the material resources of community biolabs (and
how these relate to the work done in them) to a growing body of research on
community biolabs. Landrain et al. (2013) explored the distribution of, and
the practices taking place in, “DIYbio labs” almost a decade ago. More
recently, Meyer (2020), as part of a broader examination of “biohacking”,
lists and describes projects pursued at community biolabs. Detailed
empirically grounded work on community biolabs has been provided by members
and managers, such as the matter-of-fact recounting by Scheifele and Burkett
(2016) of the challenges involved in running a “community lab”, and
suggestions to others wishing to do the same. Scroggins and Verenne (2019)
highlight the centrality of _“acrimony and dissension”_ as well as
spotlighting the considerable work involved in the establishment of a new
community biolab through the case study of BioCurious (www.biocurious.org).
Asgarali-Hoffman and Hamidi (2021) have explored the nuanced relationship
between bioartists and the organisms they work with, integrating the
perspectives of community biolab organizers. de Lange et al. (2021) have
suggested that community biolabs create unique and novel opportunities for the
formation of relationships between amateur and professional scientists as well
as between other stakeholders in order to respond to local community
challenges. The scholarly work dealing with community biolabs over the last
decade provides important context, particularly around the difficulties of
establishing community biolabs and of project work. Our study contributes to
this prior work by providing an updated view of the work taking place in
community biolabs as well as taking a comparatively narrow focus on the
material realities of work in community biolabs to better understand the
constraints and challenges faced by lab members, and to surface new
opportunities for HCI research.

###  2.3. Is work in community biolabs just ”making” with biology?

The parallels between the Maker movement and the DIYbio movement are readily
apparent, and the same can be said of makerspaces and community biolabs.
Delgado (2013) characterizes DIYbio based on a DIY hacker or maker culture:
“[DIYbio is] very much about making and messing with things by combining
wetware, software, and hardware in a low-cost fashion.” Some community biolabs
consciously identify themselves as biology makerspaces or as biohackspaces.
Community biolabs are at times presented as a subset of makerspaces and DIYbio
as a sub-movement of the Maker movement (Menichinelli and Schmidt, 2019).
However, DIYbio has also been framed as primarily a movement within natural
science practice. Keulartz and van den Belt (2016) suggest that “DIY-Bio does
not represent new science but a new way of doing science.”. DIYbio has been
described by practitioners as an alternative to institutionalized science,
despite at the same time in many ways acting to support these norms (Simons,
2021). Golinelli and Ruivenkamp (2016) offer that DIYbio can be understood as
“an engagement with advanced life sciences outside of the traditional
professional environments of the university-industrial complex.”. Kera (2012)
offers a hybrid framing, describing grassroots R&D labs that have “revived the
bottom-up relation between community building and experimenting with new
knowledge and technologies”, encompassing sites of DIYbio alongside maker,
hacker, and art and design practices. For this work, we approached community
biolabs assuming that we would find a mixture of thing-making and knowledge-
making, and in our interviews we queried both the extent of maker practices
within community biolabs as well as the unique features and requirements of
biowork.

###  2.4. Providing an empirical foundation for design research to support
work in community biolabs

We are interested in supporting DIYbio practitioners by providing context
about the material realities of DIYbio work to inform future systems design
research. Among the concerns of context-aware designers found by Bauer et al.
(2014) are the intentions, preferences, and prior knowledge of users, as well
as considering the physical environment and the way that the designed system
will exist within that space and communicate with users. Novel contexts can
profoundly alter both how the work is performed as well as its significance.
Dourish (2004) points out in a consideration of the role of context in systems
design that “the word ‘hello’ can be not only a greeting, but an inquiry, a
rebuff, a joke, an exclamation, etc., depending on how, when and by whom it is
used.” Analogously, smearing a petri dish of agar jelly with bacteria and
letting the colonies grow in an incubator could be an artwork, an experiment,
or a student project depending on the context. Kuznetsov et al. (2012) and
colleagues have previously demonstrated examples of how the context in which
biowork is performed and presented can radically reshape its meaning and
suggest alternative goals for laboratory biology systems designers. Therefore,
we believe that surface level notions of what work is performed in community
biolabs and under what conditions, i.e., the sort of data available by merely
browsing biolab websites, is not a good basis to inform future engagement
between HCI and DIYbio work at community biolabs. We contribute our findings
and discussion from interviews with contemporary users and managers of
community biolabs, adding to the small but growing body of HCI research into
the diverse, technology-rich ways of working with biological materials that is
encompassed within the term DIYbio.

##  3\. Methods

In this section, we provide detail on our positionality, data collection, and
data analysis methods

###  3.1. Positionality

To provide context to our inquiry and analysis, we are including details on
author background and positions (Schlesinger et al., 2017; Bardzell and
Bardzell, 2011; Liang et al., 2021). The first author has extensive experience
both as a formally trained professional laboratory biologist and as community
biolab member and manager. (SoundBio Lab; Orlando de Lange). We leveraged his
position to recruit participants and his knowledge to provide context for
understanding the specific lab materials, techniques, and equipment.

###  3.2. Method selection

We are interested in what people do, why they do it, and the context within
which they work. We felt that a semi-structured interview method, compared to
a survey or structured interview, would provide the appropriate amount and
quality of data since it allows for interviewer follow-up questions and for
the interviewee to explain their answers at length. As one of the authors has
extensive experience working in professional and community biolabs, much of
the valuable context that would be provided through observational methods was
not necessary to address the goals of this study, and rather we considered it
more important to prioritize collecting data from a greater number of
participants working at a greater range of community biolabs, in terms of
geographical location and operational model. Our methods were vetted by our
institute’s IRB.

###  3.3. Identifying community biolabs and recruiting participants

Lab | Participant Name | Participant Role in Lab | Location
---|---|---|---
Biotech Without Borders | Ibrahim Dulijan | User | New York, NY, USA
Boslab | Kellen Andrilenas | User, Manager, Educator | Boston, MA, USA
Boslab | Wendy Pouliot | Manager | Boston, MA, USA
BUGSS | Anonymous | User | Baltimore, MD, USA
BUGSS | Lisa Scheifele | Manager, Educator | Baltimore, MD, USA
BUGSS | Yann Huon de Kermadec | User | Baltimore, MD, USA
Cambridge Biomakespace | Anonymous | Manager, Educator | Cambridge, UK
Counter Culture Labs | Tim Dobbs | User, Manager, Educator | Oakland, CA, USA
Hive Biolab | Prince Edem Samoh | User, Manager, Educator | Kumasi, Ghana
London Biohackspace | James Phillips | User, Manager, Educator | London, UK
Open Science Network | Scott Pownall | Manager | Vancouver, Canada
ReaGent | Anonymous | Manager | Ghent, Belgium
SoundBio Lab | Anonymous | User, Manager, Educator | Seattle, WA, USA
SoundBio Lab | Chris Gloeckner | User, Manager | Seattle, WA, USA
SoundBio Lab | Garima Thakur | Manager | Seattle, WA, USA
TriDIYBio | Tom Randall | Manager | Durham, NC, USA
Table 1. Lab and Participant information

For this study, we define a community biolab as a physical lab space equipped
for life science work that is run as a not-for-profit enterprise independent
of any large institution such as a university or biotech company. In addition,
access must not be limited by professional qualifications and the space should
not be primarily oriented towards start-up business support, i.e. not
primarily a biotech incubator. We reemphasize here that there is no widely
adopted external or community-internal definition or model for what
constitutes a community biolab. Even the labs we included under our narrow
criteria represent a range of different models, informed by different goals
and worldviews, though, as we found, reasonably unified in terms of equipment
and regular activities. de Lange has four years of experience managing
community biolabs and regularly attends community gatherings. We used his
prior knowledge to establish a shortlist of relevant lab spaces, and
supplemented this with a broad keyword internet search. We identified a total
of nineteen labs worldwide that we could confidently confirm as in scope and
still operational. Additional labs were identified that, based on online
presence or personal correspondence, seemed to be no longer operating or
otherwise did not meet our inclusion criteria. We are confident that we were
able to identify all or almost all in-scope labs, though there is reason to
suspect that additional in-scope labs exist in regions other than Europe and
Anglophone countries.

We reached out to people at the labs we knew to be in scope as well as others
that we were unsure of. We asked to interview those who manage lab spaces and
are in a position to speak broadly about the work pursued in their lab, as
well as people who have been engaged in sustained project work that uses the
lab space and its material resources. We used existing relationships or
contacted potential participants via publicly available email addresses or
social media accounts. We present data from interviews with sixteen people
working at eleven different community biolabs in North America, Europe, and
Africa, detailed in Table 1. These include nine of the nineteen labs we had
already defined as in-scope, as well as two additional labs that on careful
evaluation fit our criteria closely enough to warrant inclusion. We believe
that our sample includes data from members of roughly half of the extant
community biolabs that we were able to identify. Twelve participants
identified as White or Caucasian, two as Asian, one as Black, and one
preferred not to identify. Eleven participants identified as men, five as
women. All participants had undergraduate or graduate level STEM education,
and fourteen of them were employed in a STEM field at the time of the
interview. We concluded that one of the labs from our initial recruitment,
based in Los Angeles, once described by an interviewee, fell outside the scope
of this study because it primarily served as a space for the work of the
interviewee’s private company, despite sharing many features of other labs we
included and being managed by an individual with extensive experience using
and managing other community biolabs in prior years. This interview and lab
were dropped from our sample, and are not included in the final dataset of
sixteen interviews from eleven labs. This example is reflective of the
diversity of sites of DIYbio practice, and illustrates that the definition of
community biolab we have used is just one possible definition, and that
further empirical work into the diverse forms of DIYbio practice is needed.

###  3.4. Data collection and analysis

We asked participants to complete a short intake questionnaire providing
information on demographics, prior expertise or education, and their role (or
roles) in relationship to their current community biolab (manager, user,
educator). Then we conducted 45 minute semi-structured individual interviews
of all sixteen participants with one or more authors on Zoom. We used
different pre-planned interview protocols for when a participant considered
themselves primarily a lab manager or a lab user, while acknowledging that
such a clean distinction was not possible to make for most participants,
allowing for ad hoc elaboration on questions. Participants who identified as
educators also always held the roles of lab user or manager, so a separate
interview protocol was not necessary for educator roles. We questioned lab
managers about the space, the equipment within it, and the work involved in
managing the space. We asked lab users to describe in detail the work they
conduct within the lab space, the resources they use, and the challenges they
face. In all cases participants were asked about the motivations for their
work in the community biolab. In addition to interview data, we also collected
photos and other documentation (project websites, albums, etc) that
participants voluntarily shared. Finally, we cross-referenced interview data
with photos and information from the publicly posted websites, blogs, and
social media accounts belonging to the respective labs.

We transcribed the interview recordings automatically using temi.com, and then
inspected and manually corrected each transcript for accuracy. Following a
thematic analysis method (Braun and Clarke, 2006, 2019; Saldaña, 2021), we
developed a codebook of 33 provisional codes in collaborative sessions, which
expanded to 44 codes and subcodes during inductive coding of transcripts. Our
codes captured several types of data, including descriptive (physical
equipment, software, costs, space management, materials, expertise…), process
(help, learning, time management, external collaboration, automation,
coordinating work…), and conceptual (barriers, vision/worldview, unrewarding
labor, existential threat, motivations…). Each transcript was coded by one of
three authors using Taguette software, and then separately reviewed and re-
coded by the remaining two authors for intercoder agreement and reliability.
During secondary analysis discussions and writing, we themed all of the coded
data into two categories (Equipment/Tools/Materials, and Work), with prominent
subthemes of each category supported by frequency counts of applicable codes
and relevance to our research goals. These themes and subthemes are presented
in our Findings, and our interpretations and suggestions are presented in the
Discussion.

###  3.5. Limitations of our methods

#### COVID-19 pandemic.

Interviews were conducted from Spring 2021 to January 2022, meaning that
community biolabs had been managing COVID-19 pandemic related restrictions for
over a year in most cases. We asked about the impacts of the pandemic in all
cases. Participants reported severe limitations on access to the lab and group
activities such as workshops, but some project work had been able to continue.
If work had ceased during the pandemic, we asked interviewees to report on the
pre-pandemic situation.

#### Geographical limitation.

The majority of the organizations we identified as in scope are based in the
USA and this is reflected in the locations of our interviewees. We are aware
of groups in India, Africa and Latin America that we could not unequivocally
determine to be in scope based on publicly available information. The use of
prior knowledge and English language keyword internet searches may have led to
us missing some organizations entirely. We feel that our results are likely to
provide a representative sample of conditions in community biolabs in 2021,
but considering that even within our sample we found a great deal of diversity
in organizational models, practices, and perspectives, caution should be taken
in extrapolating any particular finding to labs not surveyed or into the
future or past of community biolabs.

##  4\. Findings

We present findings on the nature and context of technoscientific work in
community biolabs. We pay particular attention to issues of relevance to
systems design and human-computer interaction research.

The community biolabs described by participants ranged in size from a single
500 square-foot room to a space ten times that, spread across multiple
separate rooms. Images of some of these lab spaces are shown in Figure 2. The
community biolab spaces were arranged following the norms of professional life
science laboratories, featuring benches for project work and specialist
equipment on hand, sometimes grouped into dedicated work areas, e.g., media
prep area. Chemicals were stored separately from other materials.

From participants identifying as lab managers we learned that significant
organizational work, often provided by volunteers, is required to keep
community biolabs operational. In some cases, one or two people were
responsible for day-to-day supervision and support of lab operations, as well
as administrative tasks such as updating the website or filing taxes. In most
cases, lab management was entirely a voluntary activity. Four of eleven labs
reported having one person in a full or part-time paid position supporting
project work, three of which were general lab managers and one was supported
by a grant to work on a specific project. Estimates of total lab management
time investments were reported as fluctuating week to week, from as little as
zero for a quiet week but in most cases at least 10 hours a week. We found
that some lab managers feared for the long term sustainability of their
organizations due to threats of financial insecurity or volunteer labor burn
out.

Structured educational activities were mentioned by most participants but we
purposefully focused our interview questions on project work. Community
biolabs organize workshops, courses, talks, and schools’ outreach activities,
and the distinction we have drawn between education work and project work is
not necessarily easy to draw in practice when considering the complete set of
activities supported by any given community biolab.

With a single exception, participants told us that the community biolab
offered them resources they would have no other way to access in their
geographic area. Key affordances of these shared sites of practice include
equipment, space, opportunities to procure otherwise restricted materials,
relevant provisions for safe work, and opportunities to learn with and from
co-practitioners, as well as providing some users with a valuable sense of
contributing or giving back. All labs provided safety oversight, as explored
below, while some provided safety training to all new members. One participant
with a background in life sciences valued being in a ”lab setting” and _”the
whole embodied knowledge that comes back as you feel the place”_. These sites,
though few in number and limited in space, provide considerable meaning and
value to those who use them.

###  4.1. How do community biolabs use and manage equipment, tools, and
materials

Figure 4. Some of th especialized equipment commonly found in many of the
community biolabs in our sample. Nearly all of our labs acquired professional-
grade equipment through donations or secondhand purchases. These photos were
all taken at SoundBio Lab. Top row, left to right: Light Microscope; Incubator
with orbital shaker positioned inside; Fridge; Gel electrophoresis equipment.
Bottom row, left to right: Set of micropipettes; Thermocycler; Benchtop
microcentrifuge; Laminar flow hood.

[Eight examples of equipment commonly found in a community biolab.]Photos
include: a microscope on a table, an cube shaped incubator with an orbital
shaker inside it, a standard size refrigerator, equipment for gel
electrophoresis on a tabletop, a laminar flow hood that takes up the corner of
a room, a benchtop microcentrifuge with the lid open, a small thermocycler,
and a collection of handheld pipette tools.

Physical tools (esp. those controlled via a digital interface) are a
productive site of intersection between DIYbio and HCI (Kuznetsov et al.,
2015; Fernando and Kuznetsov, 2020; Gome et al., 2019). We therefore asked
participants to list and describe the tools they work with, what they use them
for, and how they were obtained.

The exact set of equipment and materials varied between labs, as did the range
of projects and other activities occurring in the spaces. However, a unifying
feature is that all of these spaces have been equipped to support the broad
domain of laboratory life science practices known as molecular biology,
encompassing work that centers on the manipulation of DNA, RNA and proteins,
as well as culturing microbes and other common lab organisms. Figure 4 shows
some of the equipment that was listed by most study participants. Some
community biolabs included benches with built in controlled airflow to allow
for sterile work or work with potentially biohazardous materials such as
animal cell cultures. Community biolabs provide dedicated space and
professional-standard equipment for laboratory biology work.

####  4.1.1. Materials are controlled to ensure safety

All but one participant identifying as a lab manager shared with us that lab
safety is a central concern of their role. Every lab had safety systems in
place, some formal (e.g., required safety training) and some informal (lab
manager advises on and prohibits certain work as needed). A minority of lab
managers expressed anxiety around the possibility of a safety incident due to
a random accident.

Work in community biolabs is kept safe either through the adoption of rules
and standards shared with members, or by the bespoke review and intervention
of expert lab managers. We asked all participants about the importance of
safety and about the specific mechanisms they use to prevent unsafe work.
Participants from five of eleven labs mentioned voluntary adherence to the
Biosafety Level 1 standards of the National Institutes of Health, or European
equivalents. Five described to us that they restrict the materials that can be
brought into the lab space, and three described restricting specific lab
activities. In three cases, participants shared examples of reviewing and
rejecting project proposals on safety grounds, and three labs mentioned a
designated safety director or committee. Three of the participants in our
study described providing individual oversight and targeted safety
intervention to every project in the lab they manage, tailoring the degree of
oversight to the perceived trustworthiness of the lab member. We found that
while safety is a near universal priority for community biolabs in our study,
the mechanisms for keeping work safe vary from lab to lab, though a dominant
theme was early or preemptive intervention to stop work with specific
materials perceived to be unsafe.

> Lisa: We actually have a white list of what we allow in the lab. So there
> are certain things that, you know, salt, you can bring that in. No problem.
> Um, and then anything that’s not on the white list, you’ve got to tell us,
> and you’ve got to get checked over with us. And for a new member when they
> joined, we have required them to kind of write out a paragraph, what’s your
> project. So we understand it.

Machines and tools are the dominant concern for makerspace safety systems,
contrasting with the emphasis on materials (chemicals and organisms) in
biolabs, a difference made explicit in a 2016 proposal to adapt biolab safety
norms to makerspaces by swapping out controlled materials for controlled
equipment (Klein et al., 2016). As an example of how materials are a locus of
safety control, several lab managers described examples where a project had
been disallowed since it required work with mammalian cell cultures which can
become reservoirs for pathogenic microbes or viruses that can then pass to
humans. Chemicals can present a range of immediate safety hazards during use,
but also must be stored and disposed of safely, creating not just anxiety but
unwanted labor for lab managers. Concerns were also raised in relation to a
few types of equipment such as high-speed centrifuges and autoclaves
(pressurized steam-based sterilizers).

####  4.1.2. The cost of commercial lab equipment is not a major constraint

Every lab we heard from sourced equipment second-hand through donations,
comprising the vast majority of equipment in all but one of the labs within
our sample. Local biotech companies and university labs were cited as sources
of equipment, and at six of the labs in our sample equipment was available
that had been purchased, loaned, or donated directly by lab members. One lab
manager had their own well-equipped home lab and described ferrying some
equipment and materials back and forth. Equipment had also been purchased
second-hand at most of the labs in our sample, with eBay repeatedly cited as a
platform for these activities. The only lab in the developing world within our
sample was also the only example of a lab equipped largely with newly
purchased equipment, sourced via a major collaboration with a partner in
another country.

Rather than struggling to obtain expensive professional-standard lab
equipment, as we might have expected, in many cases participants lamented the
overabundance of equipment and materials, because it was leading to space
constraints.

> Wendy: We have personally reorganized the lab about 14 times because it’s
> trying to fit it in a very small space, uh, and manage storage…And now we’ve
> taken in so many donations during COVID that it’s scattered in everyone’s
> storage units…It’s a hot mess.

Eleven participants spoke of equipment in the lab that was broken, unreliable
or had been repaired. We did not collect data that would allow us to form a
clear idea of how community biolabs are coping with the burden of equipment
maintenance, which may represent more of a problem as time progresses and the
still relatively new, second-hand equipment in community biolabs ages.

> Anonymous: The equipment itself is mostly off of eBay or is donated by
> people who don’t want it anymore and take it as a tax write off. So it’s old
> equipment, some of it’s iffy, some of it stopped working, uh, and you know,
> some of it started working again when you hit it right. Some of it didn’t.
> So, you know, there were always challenges like that.

Obtaining lab equipment of sufficient variety, quantity, and quality to allow
members to pursue technoscientific work that they find meaningful does not
seem to be a challenge for community biolabs in our study. However,
participants cited multiple examples of specific types of desired equipment
that they struggled to obtain. These included specialist freezers able to
store samples at -80°C (required for long term storage of microorganisms);
more powerful centrifuges; and ventilated workbenches either to trap and
export fumes (fume hood), create a sterile work area (laminar flow hood), or
to block the escape of dangerous organisms or biomaterials from the sterile
work area (biosafety cabinet). Two participants wanted to obtain a machine for
high-throughput DNA sequencing. None of the labs in our study had machines for
DNA sequencing; we learned about work at three labs that involved sending off
DNA samples to be sequenced via external collaborators or services.

Specialist equipment is not the only thing crucial to work in community
biolabs. Project work also requires labware (e.g., glass beakers), a range of
specialty disposable plastics known as consumables (e.g., micro-pipette tips
and small resealable plastic tubes), chemicals and reagents, and the organisms
and biomaterials that are the primary focus of any given project. Some of
these items are depicted in Figure 3. We focused our inquiry on equipment, but
three lab managers shared that they also received substantial donations of
consumables and chemicals. Specialist reagents and chemicals were each
mentioned as cost barriers and one participant talked about the difficulty
they encountered convincing some companies to ship these specialist items to a
non-university, non-industry lab.

We found that community biolabs were successfully sourcing an abundance of
high-end laboratory equipment for no- or low-cost. However, lab members in
many cases do still face barriers in accessing the equipment and materials
they need, in functional condition, and at a price they can afford.

####  4.1.3. Making equipment creates new opportunities for meaningful work

Making is common in community biolabs but DIY equipment or tools were rarely
described as crucial to support scientific project work. When asked about
making practices, 14 participants were able to cite a total of 35 specific
examples of research tools or equipment that they or others had made in-house.
Examples included simple re-purposing, such as using a reptile terrarium as a
laboratory incubator, or an aquarium as a makeshift sterile work bench, or
fabricating a camera mount for time-lapse photography. More sophisticated
examples included a DIY shaker-incubator (for cultivating microorganisms) and
a DIY gene gun (for delivering lab-prepped DNA into cells). In another
community biolab, a group of members had refashioned a 3-D printer into a
working bioprinter with the intention of encapsulating microalgae in a gel
matrix. This not only created new possibilities for project work, but
attracted significant interest from other lab members, acting as a nucleation
point for new social connections.

Making lab equipment is rarely driven by the high cost or non-availability of
equipment, rather the process itself was attractive to participants as a fun
and enriching activity. Creating frugal lab equipment is seen as a compelling
challenge by some community biolab members.

> Anonymous: During that week I was fascinated by it [3D printed centrifuge].
> But then after that I kind of just stopped using it just because I didn’t
> really have a need for it. It was just for fun and trying to figure out how
> this works.

Six of the labs we heard from were housed within or in the same building as a
makerspace, and a collaboration with a local makerspace was mentioned by a
participant from one of the other labs. In following up on the nature of the
interactions it seemed that the biolab activities were almost totally
independent from the makerspaces and most biolab members weren’t transitioning
back and forth. Nevertheless, the availability of equipment, materials or
expertise from the makerspace and its users was accessed at least
intermittently to support maker activities in the biolab, according to our
interviewees:

> Wendy: We have a bioprinter that was hacked from a 3-D printer and that was
> made by a group […] who crafted that in collaboration with another
> makerspace so that we could obtain the necessary parts since we don’t […]
> have a machine shop or any capability of really making some of the
> components.

While it seems that most of the equipment used in community biolabs has been
sourced ultimately from a commercial manufacturer, that does not mean that DIY
lab equipment is an irrelevant concept as value can be derived not only from
the product but also from the process itself. Relationships between community
biolabs and makerspaces are already common and productive, if limited in scope
and depth.

####  4.1.4. Enthusiasm outstrips applications for automated liquid handling

Machine automation is used regularly in community biolabs, for example in the
form of thermocyclers (see Figure 4) that automate the rapid cycles of heating
and cooling required for a PCR reaction. However we were particularly
interested in whether robotic automation would be prevalent in community
biolabs, in line with growing adoption within professional biolabs,
particularly in industry and clinical settings and to much lesser extent in
academic research labs (Holland and Davies, 2020). In fact a majority (seven)
of the labs we heard from listed an automated liquid handling platform, most
commonly an OpenTrons robot, among the equipment available in their lab. In
addition, many interviewees expressed interest in, and broad support for,
robotic automation though few had used robotic automation or had any concrete
plans to do so in the future. Desirable affordances of automation offered by
participants included common refrains around automation in professional
biolabs (Holland and Davies, 2020) such as speed, efficiency, scale, safety,
reproducibility, accuracy. Additional affordances hypothesized or realized by
participants included skills development for lab users, collaboration
opportunities, facilitating bioart work, and being able to work remotely (from
the lab) or at a safe distance from harmful materials.

> Kellen: Being able to select colonies as candidates and do some of that
> handling would … allow an individual to be able to do it at scale, as
> opposed to now, like, even, even just trying to get a 96 well plate of
> plasmids cloned with a team of sort of untrained people. It was a challenge
> and we didn’t even finish it all the way because people were like, cool, I’m
> done now. And they’re like, but wait, there’s more, wait come back, I have
> more labor. So having a robot do that would be like aces.

Figure 5. The bioartbot.org project at Counter Culture Labs was the project
with the most extensive use of automation in our study. Participants in the
project design an image via a website, which is then printed in bacteria using
the lab’s OpenTrons OT-2 liquid handling robot. Clockwise from top left: the
Opentrons OT-2; a design on the bioartbot.org interface; pipetting bacteria
onto a gel substrate using the Opentrons; art pieces after incubation; colored
bacteria prepared in flasks.

[Process photos of the bioartbot.org project.]The Opentrons machine is cube
shaped with transparent sides taped on, sitting on a cluttered tabletop next
to a computer and a ladder. The photo of the website interface shows an
example drawing of a robot face that says ”assist all humans.” An action shot
of the Opentrons automatically pipetting bacteria into rectangular plates
containing a gel substrate. A row of glass flasks show different colors of
bacteria in solutions. Three finished bio artworks are colorful drawings of a
pumpkin, some butterflies, and the Assist All Humans robot face.

One interviewee at Counter Culture Labs was making extensive use of the
OpenTrons OT-2 robot as a platform for a project aimed at engaging non-lab
members through a website to design an image to be printed in bacteria onto a
solid growth medium by the lab robot (bioartbot.org), as seen in Figure 5.
Interestingly, this participant’s engineering background and expertise was
such that the robot offered an attractive entry point to work in the community
biolab. The project also showcases the potential for automated machines to
facilitate the precision execution of creative expression and to be a platform
around which social interactions can be organized. In two other labs the
liquid handling robot was being lightly used with a view to heavier use in the
future.

In some cases, participants suggested that automated liquid handling was
unlikely to be useful in a community biolab setting when weighed against the
drawbacks. The difficulties in setting up, using, or maintaining the machine
were mentioned by three participants, while two cited a lack of available
bench space. Several participants also mentioned that, despite enthusiasm,
there isn’t currently a need to work at the scale afforded by a liquid
handling robot.

> Anonymous: I think the reason we don’t have automation on a widespread call
> for it in our labs at the moment … I guess I’m thinking of the OpenTrons
> stuff here … I think we have so many one-offs that it hasn’t rewarded, um,
> making something that’s highly repeatable, you know, being taken out of, out
> of our hands.

Robotic automation currently occupies an ambiguous position within community
biolab work. Systems are available and lab members are interested in using
them, but actual usage seems to be limited.

###  4.2. What work is performed in community biolabs, and what are the
conditions and motivations that surround it

We are interested in the activities taking place in community biolabs as part
of ongoing project work pursued by lab members. Participants talked about
projects with a diverse range of goals, but day-to-day activities often
involved the manipulation of microorganisms and DNA. Examples of techniques
employed by lab users included culturing microbes, mostly yeast and bacteria,
followed by precision purification of DNA or other biomolecules, such as
insulin, from microbial cells. Several participants described using gel
electrophoresis to separate DNA molecules within a physical gel substrate (as
depicted in Figure 6) and others described preparing DNA samples to be sent to
collaborators or companies for DNA sequencing. Stitching DNA fragments
together to make circular plasmid DNA and then introducing that DNA into
bacterial cells—a process called genetic transformation—was also mentioned.
Many of the tools needed for these tasks are shown in Figures 3 and 4.

Some of the projects described to us involved clearly defined goals, with
structure such as check-in meetings to assign near-term priorities and provide
accountability, though participants also mentioned numerous examples of
projects that dramatically shifted goals or activities unexpectedly, or
examples of work abruptly ceasing. Project work described by participants
included both individually conceived and executed projects as well as
cooperative projects with a range of team sizes. We did not find that
cooperative project work involved clearly defined roles or hierarchies
resembling the traditional principal investigator model of university life
science research labs.

One participant spoke at length about the value of a horizontal team structure
and their desire to avoid hierarchies, despite the logistical challenges this
created. The paths and social structures of projects at community biolabs must
respond to the realities of these organizations with new members coming and
going, changing interests and availability and a lack of clear, hierarchical
roles. Participants emphasized the importance of learned skills ranging from
laboratory techniques and use of specific equipment through to failure
tolerance, patience, and scientific thinking. These expertise barriers,
together with the time sensitivities of biowork (long workflows involving many
steps, long incubation times, and certain steps to be performed within certain
time windows such as shown in the example workflow of Figure 3) were raised as
significant complications for the pursuit of cooperative work, particularly
work between individuals with different prior training and experience levels.

####  4.2.1. Community biolab project work is time sensitive and time
consuming

One participant was in the rare position of having been awarded a grant that
allowed him to work full time on his project. Some users are retirees with
more free time to devote. But in most cases, users of community biolabs were
working in their free time alongside jobs, studies, child-care duties or other
competing demands. This was exacerbated by the additional time required to get
to and from the lab space, particularly for labs sited in large cities, for
each lab work session. This can lead to relatively large time investments in
travel time to accomplish quick, routine, tasks.

> Lisa: I think, you know this about community labs, people come from far away
> sometimes because there’s only one in a metro area usually, so people have
> to travel a bit of a distance and […] with biology, there’s stuff that has
> to get done every day. And sometimes it’s literally five minutes of work.
> Like you’ve got to scrape a bacterial cell, put it in some broth.

Many common techniques used in biolabs also require long periods of waiting.
For example, a PCR reaction, depending on the precise thermal cycling
programming used, may take 1-3 hours to complete. Laboratory techniques often
involve chemically complex mixtures of materials, undergoing reactions
occurring unseen and for which success or failure can only be assessed at the
end of the process via a separate assay.

> Anonymous: If you’re just trying to PCR a really long fragment, it can take
> a couple of hours, and chemical transformations take a lot [of time] too and
> they don’t always work, you have to redo them sometimes. And so that gets
> pretty frustrating, and just eats up a lot of time. Yeah, biology is just
> really finicky.

Lab users working with living organisms had to attend to the sensitivities of
growth rates, and the fact that in most cases organisms can only be stored for
limited time periods before dying due to lack of nutrients or otherwise
becoming unusable. Figure 3 shows a hypothetical workflow similar to several
examples shared during interviews, and illustrates the way that lab work with
laboratory organisms requires practitioners to devote not only significant
time but also to carefully structure that invested time.

####  4.2.2. Expertise requirements complicate cooperative work

Most of the participants in this study had completed a graduate degree in a
STEM topic or were currently employed professionally in a STEM field, in
accord with a 2013 survey of the broader DIYbio community (Daniel Grushkin,
2013). For some participants, the community biolab was a unique space that
allowed them to retain and use their professionally developed expertise. For
other participants, the community biolab was a space to develop new expertise,
either through project work or inspired by encounters with other community
biolab users with different areas of expertise.

> Anonymous: I met some bioinformaticians in the space and now I am like a
> software engineer/bioinformatician, and I would never have realized that
> that was a career option without the space.

However, interviewees also cited times that the lack of specific technical
knowledge or skills created a barrier to progress on a project. The diverse
laboratory biology practices being pursued in community biolabs mean that no
one individual, even with a professional laboratory biology background, is
likely to be able to provide advice or training to all lab users.

> Kellen: I have PhD in cell and molecular biology. So this is what I do. It,
> I think for other folks in the lab, it is definitely a stumbling block …
> cause they’re like, oh, I want to do this thing, and we’re like, that’s
> great, now we get to teach you how to do that thing, which is a little more
> challenging. There’s certainly areas where I do not have sufficient
> knowledge, like my knowledge of metabolic engineering…that’s not my area.

The problem of generating and sharing expertise in community biolabs is
vexing. Essential to the model of these spaces is that no professional
qualifications are required to become a member, but this does not mean that
members do not appreciate the importance of expertise and the difficulty for
new members in acquiring the required expertise while wanting to immediately
make progress on their projects. Nine participants in the study talked about
the importance of sharing expertise or training others in order to allow
project work to advance. A significant barrier exists for those even just
wishing to participate in work within a project designed by another person;
any given project in a community biolab is likely to require expertise in
using multiple machines, instruments, materials and reagents as well as having
enough knowledge about the underlying biology and how the methods work to be
able to troubleshoot and interpret data. To be able to be the primary designer
of a project was presented as an even greater hurdle, and one that might seem
deceptively simple to those with no laboratory biology experience. The time it
takes for members to gain and share expertise adds to the substantial time
investment for community biolab project work.

> Tom: Expertise, I think is the issue. There are people out there who want to
> get into a project, and the problem is they don’t really know how to work a
> Pipetman, or don’t know how to streak a plate or do a PCR. They’ve heard
> about all this stuff, but getting them proficient at just some of the basic
> things you do. I found out this is a lot harder than you would think to get
> somebody to actually do an experiment. It doesn’t come easy to people,
> apparently. I mean, I’ve been doing this my whole life, so it’s all second
> nature. But someone coming into this with an interesting idea who has no
> experience in a lab, I don’t think they really realize that it’s very
> different from writing a computer program or doing an electronic circuit.
> It’s a total different skillset that you’ve gotta learn.

####  4.2.3. Lab members are coordinating cooperative work with limited
software support

Interviewees shared that they often collaborate with other lab members.
Sharing expertise, dividing labor, and the positive social experience were all
raised as motivations for group as opposed to solo work. Group work was
described as being complicated by limited and variable availability of the
time of project members, set against the time demands and sensitivities of
biowork. And as explored, expertise differentials created frustrations. We
asked about the software tools lab members relied on to support cooperative
work, particularly in the context of coordinating group tasks and sharing
project data. We found that project members were largely relying on generic
workplace communication and file management tools, such as email, Slack, and
Google Suite, and were using these to communicate technical project
information, share expertise, organize project data, schedule work, manage
volunteers and manage inventory. In most cases this wasn’t framed as a
problem, though two participants did indicate that a lack of appropriate tools
to coordinate group work was a limitation.

> Wendy: Communication across members is very difficult. We have a Slack
> channel and it’s often individuals will slack each other about, ‘I’m coming
> into the lab on Thursday and I need help with so-and-so’… They might have a
> laboratory notebook, although nobody is really using a digital lab notebook.
> So it’s a lot of on paper, in-person communication, with Slack being used to
> mainly coordinate timing of things… I think it’s a struggle. I think that a
> lot of people in our group are working in either silos or very small groups,
> because there’s no clear cut way that seems to be a good way to communicate
> both data and all of that other information.

Figure 6. DNA fragment analysis through the gel electrophoresis method is an
example of the direct visual data analysis frequently performed in community
biolabs. This process of separating and sorting stained DNA fragments,
alongside a ”ladder” of fragments of known length, results in an artifact with
lines that glow under UV or blue light (depending on the stain used). Shown
here are three such artifacts from labs in our sample, the photos of which
were digitally labeled after the fact for illustrative purposes. The
practitioner, relying on expertise, infers meaningful information about the
DNA signatures of the samples by examining the lines in each column and
comparing their positions relative to the ladder and to each other. This image
might be stored in a lab notebook, or results might be simply communicated to
project members as ‘success’ or ‘failure’ for each of the samples. Analysis of
DNA gels was mentioned by multiple interviewees, but is also broadly
representative of data analysis methods common in community biolabs that
require a careful examination of a physical or digital object to produce a
clear, qualitative judgment without the need for computational quantitative
analysis, in contrast to ‘big data’ as mentioned in 4.2.4.

[Three examples of gel electrophoresis data artifacts with explanatory labels
superimposed on the gel images.]Three photos of gel electrophoresis artifacts,
each of which is a rectangle of solid gel with columns of glowing lines. On
each gel, a ”ladder” line is on one or both sides, with other columns of lines
next to it for qualitative comparison. All three images have digital labels
superimposed to identify the fragments being analyzed.

Laboratory biology projects often involve complex, multi-day, timing-sensitive
workflows, processing a large number of separate biological samples. Software
tools known as Laboratory Information Management Systems (LIMS) are used to
track inventory and associated data through workflows in many professional
labs, particularly in commercial and biomedical settings. Some interviewees
used free software, namely Quartzy and Benchling, to track inventory and
associated data. Systems had been set up in two of the labs in our study using
QR codes to track inventory for the whole lab or for a specific project, as a
means to gain control over the perceived tendency towards disorder inherent to
biowork:

> Lisa: One thing that was really helpful was putting QR codes on
> everything…We had a little kind of QR code maker. And so every sample got a
> QR code. Every primer that went into a reaction had a QR code, every PCR
> product that was produced got a QR code and then an Excel spreadsheet. … I
> think we had to kind of develop the systems as we went… because, you know,
> we lost things and in the typical lab way, we had random tubes labeled 1
> through 12 that we were like, What are these?

Most participants didn’t express a desire for more software tools to support
cooperative work. However, considering the current reliance on a limited range
of generic tools, there seem to be opportunities for the development of new
software options to streamline communication, track inventory and sample data,
and otherwise facilitate the interconnected actions of DIYbio practitioners as
they design and execute project work.

####  4.2.4. Little engagement with ‘big data’

Over the last decade, computationally intensive work requiring the collection
and analysis of large datasets (‘big data’) has become increasingly
commonplace within laboratory biology (Fillinger et al., 2019). We found that
community biolabs resembled professional biology labs in the equipment,
materials, and many of the techniques used, but in stark contrast few projects
required any sort of computational data analysis and largely involved work
with small numbers of samples. Three participants described project work that
required computational analysis while eight explained that the data they
engaged with during project work could be easily interpreted by eye without
computational analysis and in most cases the data were images that could be
qualitatively assessed. Data analysis was important to much of the work
described to us and significant domain expertise is required to extract
meaning from data artifacts in community biolabs. However, data analysis was
often restricted to direct visual assessment of the physical or digital
products of a machine or lab tool (as in the DNA fragment analysis through the
gel electrophoresis workflow shown in Figure 6) without the need for data to
be downloaded and processed in a digital format. Lab users described
collecting data to the extent that this could inform their next physical
actions, e.g., visually assessing whether bacteria had grown on an antibiotic
containing plate to infer whether a genetic transformation was successful and
the new strain could be used in the next phase of the workflow. A notable
exception to this finding was the Barcode the Harbor project at BUGSS, which
relied heavily on computational analysis of large datasets.

Computational data analysis often accompanies laboratory biology work in
professional settings, but requires different skill sets as reflected in the
emergence of “bioinformatician” as a distinct role in some labs (Chang, 2015).
Three interviewees had professional training in computer programming, another
described being _“into bioinformatics”_. Five participants mentioned other lab
members with backgrounds in software engineering, computer science, IT, data
science, or bioinformatics. One lab manager pointed out that many of the
people who express interest in their lab are from computer science or
bioinformatics backgrounds, and that these people would benefit from more ways
to contribute their computational skills to working in the lab. Our data
suggest that big data work (‘big data’) is rare in community biolabs for
reasons other than a lack of prerequisite expertise among lab users. Cost
could be a reason. Laboratory workflows that generate large volumes of
quantitative data are likely to require large amounts of consumable materials
such as purified enzymes, which remain prohibitively costly for many
practitioners. Coordinating the laboratory work for data generation may be a
major barrier for the reasons explored above. However, it could also be that
users of community biolabs are not particularly interested or motivated by
projects that require extensive time spent processing data away from the lab
bench. Further research would be required to further probe the reasons for our
finding that big data projects are rare at community biolabs.

####  4.2.5. Community biolab members find their work meaningful and rewarding

We found that motivations for community biolab users were diverse, but that
the satisfaction derived from having the freedom to pursue their own curiosity
and to learn new skills was mentioned many times. One participant described
the “open learning culture” that they found in their community biolab,
allowing them to develop their skills while engaging in diverse scientific
activities, from _“making bioplastics”_ to _“teaching 10 year olds what
lightning is”_. Beyond the ability to explore curiosity and to learn, many
interviewees felt motivated by the idea that their work in the community
biolab was contributing to bringing about a broad social change or
demonstrating the feasibility of alternative technoscientific futures, with
the community biolab acting as stage or microcosm. Many of the specific
projects described to us were intended to create a resource such as a plasmid
(portable form of DNA) or lab protocol (like a recipe) that could be shared
with the broader DIYbio community. Social change goals were themselves
diverse, though themes included creating cooperative communities, broadening
_“access to tools of discovery”_ , promoting _“curiosity driven research”_ and
challenging corporate control of the production and distribution of
technoscientific products such as pharmaceuticals. Participants could not
always articulate a specific outcome motivating their work but nevertheless
felt that it provided something valuable to themselves and others.

> Tim: In industry, and I think in academia as well, we tend to think of the
> merit of a technical project through its… economic output or its scientific
> output, you know, does it have a novelty to it or something like that? And
> one thing I really like about this project is it really has, I think, merit
> almost on a community or an emotional or a spiritual [level]…There’s a way
> in which it can just feel good and fun and it brings people together and
> people get excited, and that’s something that I’ve really keyed into that I
> think has made me stick with it this far.

##  5\. Discussion

Building on our findings, we discuss the factors that set technosicentific
work in community biolabs apart from either professional biolabs or
makerspaces, and consider some of the pressing challenges and research
opportunities for system design to support work in community biolabs.
Surprisingly, we find that the study and design of support systems for
cooperative work may be a more fruitful area of work for HCI researchers than
the design of open hardware and labware, though much could be learned by
studying how community biolab users are innovating in that domain.

###  5.1. Community biolab members are creating new approaches to laboratory
biology work

We are interested in community biolabs as spaces for those looking to
expropriate the tools of professional laboratory biology. We found that
projects being pursued by lab members were diverse, spanning projects that
could be described as ‘synthetic biology’, ‘environmental monitoring,’ through
to ‘bioart’. The project work described to us was not primarily focused around
producing large, reliable datasets or peer-reviewed research papers—the
typical legitimized products of professional research efforts. Nevertheless,
we found that much work in community biolabs is making use of professional
expertise, commercial lab equipment, and contemporary laboratory biology
techniques, putting these to work according to members’ own personal
motivations and interests. This work is providing practitioners with
opportunities to find meaning through learning new skills, creative pursuit of
their own curiosity about the world, social connection, and a sense of
valuable social contribution.

Project work in community biolabs is driven by the interests of project
members. While the equipment, materials and techniques being employed in
community biolabs in many ways resemble those of a professional biology
laboratory, the direction and management of project work perhaps more closely
resembles work in makerspaces, with individuals or groups setting their own
agendas and timetables to pursue interests that may have little in common with
other users in the same space beyond a shared reliance on certain pieces of
equipment. This is not to say that community biolab work is not performed
within a social context that will direct to some extent the selection of
projects and the manner of execution. Most notably, every lab implemented some
sort of safety screening system that would prohibit work with certain
organisms or materials. In addition, even for projects that are not
intentionally collaborative, social interaction with other lab members is
likely unavoidable. In most cases labs were described as being space-
constrained, necessitating a degree of negotiated usage, exacerbated by the
long time scales of many life science projects. Several examples were shared
with us of chance interactions and sharing of skills or ideas leading to new
directions for project work. However, a clear contrast can be made against the
university life science research laboratory, in which the creative freedom of
research personnel must operate in accordance with norms, standards and
priorities generated within a hierarchical social structure. Future research
would be needed to reveal the likely more subtle and fluid ways that the
social structures and dynamics of community biolabs influence the work within
them.

Challenging norms within professional technoscience was specifically called
out by some participants as a motivation, and at some level, community biolabs
are inherently a critique of the gate-kept silos of professional science
systems. We can see community biolabs as laboratories for new approaches to
doing biowork. However, further research should be carried out to examine in
more detail how community biolabs accommodate technically demanding work
without relying on the more rigid infrastructures established within
professional labs to support and direct work.

Makerspaces and community biolabs resemble one another in many respects as
accessible, communal sites for hands-on creative and technical project work.
Structured educational activities and events proceed alongside private project
work. Such is the synergy that many community biolabs are co-located with or
housed within makerspaces. Work in community biolabs seems to resemble work in
makerspaces or hackerspaces not just for its sociality but also in motivations
and worldview, with many members feeling that they are giving back to some
broader community or driven by a sense of challenging dominant
technoscientific or economic norms. However, work with organisms and
biomaterials requires not only a unique set of domain specific knowledge and
skills, but also a different rhythm of work with even a single workflow
spanning days or weeks, with few opportunities to assess whether a given step
has been successful or whether instead expensive or irreplaceable materials
have gone to waste. Work in community biolabs brings the skills and mindset of
professional life science work to a social context like that of a makerspace.
This highlights the need for HCI research into systems that can support
cooperative and non-hierarchical work while accounting for the particularities
of laboratory science practice.

###  5.2. Moving beyond facsimiles of commercial lab equipment

Building low-cost equivalents of commercially available lab equipment, such as
centrifuges and thermocyclers, was viewed as an important enabling activity by
the founders of DIYbio.org (Nair, 2009; Tocchetti, 2014). Our findings suggest
that for the set of community biolabs we researched, building low-cost
equivalents of commercial lab equipment is a reasonably common activity but is
not a prerequisite or dominant concern for work in community biolabs. Quality
lab equipment is easily available at no- or low-cost via donations or purchase
through second hand re-sellers, though this may only apply to the community
biolabs located in metropolitan areas with large universities and biotech
industries.

Making equipment was not necessarily an important way to save money, but was
still being pursued by many users of community biolabs. Motivations for this
work included the building process itself offering a chance to learn new
skills, and understanding the basic mechanisms underlying equipment of that
type. Indirectly, equipment making seemed to be an opportunity for lab members
to form new social interactions either by assisting in the process of making
or appreciating the spectacle of the making and the artifact. Another possible
motivation, only hinted at, was that equipment can be made to desired
measurements, particularly relevant for accommodating bulky equipment into
non-standard spaces within already overfilled labs. Our findings demonstrate
that saving money at point of purchase is only one possible motivation for DIY
equipment making and likely the least relevant for community biolabs.

Maia Chagas (2018) has explored the benefits of open source science hardware
for the “haves” and the “have nots”. However, we found it hard to accommodate
community biolabs within a dichotomy that separates the resource-plentiful and
the very resource-constrained. Community biolabs present a potentially unique
setting for research into the design and adoption of open source laboratory
hardware, simultaneously resource-rich in many ways (equipment, expertise,
dedicated space) and yet also constrained (equipment not well maintained,
expertise not uniform, limited space). In the domain of DIY tool making, we
found a diversity of experiences and expertise as well. For some lab users,
designing a piece of lab equipment may be their primary focus, whereas for
others this is a peripheral interest. Fernando and Kuznetsov (2020) described
an open science workshop carried out at a community biolab in New York, USA,
finding exciting implications for the dissemination of open science hardware
internationally. We suggest that such approaches, or longer term participatory
design work housed within community biolabs, might also be a fruitful method
for HCI researchers to learn about the unique needs, challenges, and
affordances for DIY tool making in these hybrid settings of resource abundance
and constraint.

###  5.3. Identifying research opportunities to support cooperative work in
community biolabs

Community biolab members looking to pursue cooperative project work face a
number of concurring challenges. The two challenges that emerged most clearly
from our findings are time constraints and skill barriers. As explored above,
much laboratory biology work is both time-consuming (long protocols or long
incubation times) and time-sensitive (organisms must be grown for specific
lengths of time). Users of community biolabs are almost always hobbyists, with
community biolab work a minor activity in their lives in terms of time
allotment. The travel times to the few lab spaces serving large metropolitan
regions further exacerbate the time constraint challenge for cooperative work
in community biolabs. Under these conditions, it is clear that coordinating
teams of lab users to work cooperatively on tasks in person is a significant
challenge, as is simply finding sufficient time to communicate as a team about
goals, work, and results even if this work is done online and remotely.

The other major challenge that participants raised was that potential
collaborators often lack the skills necessarily to meaningfully contribute
without creating substantial additional labor for the more experienced
scientist leading the project. Almost all of the participants in our study
were experts with substantial formal training or years of first-hand work
experience in a relevant STEM field. Nevertheless, due to the extreme
specialization within STEM professions, many lab members described trying to
accomplish challenging tasks for which they had no prior training. Many talked
about their struggles to use their very limited time to train potential
collaborators who are novices with respect to laboratory biology to the point
where they could become productive team members. They hinted at a diverse set
of technical and soft skills that were found to be lacking in some potential
collaborators, ranging from patience and failure-tolerance through correct
technique for setting up a PCR reaction. Further data gathered specifically
from community biolab users who do not have a prior formal training in biology
would be useful to establish whether the skill and knowledge barriers
perceived by expert lab members also lead to novice users feeling that their
work is unsatisfying or unproductive. We can at least confidently say that
expert community biolab members would like to have better tools or approaches
for training novice collaborators.

Using the kernel metaphor of research infrastructure (Ribes, 2014), our study
begins to identify likely common elements of the community biolab cache
(resources such as equipment and procurement services) and the addressing
(work to make cache resources available, in which paid or volunteer lab
managers play a leading role). Future work would be needed to elucidate these
elements further. Digital tools and platforms to support the addressing of
research infrastructures are increasingly common for cooperative work in
professional life sciences. We found that project work in community biolabs is
being supported by generic software tools for communication and file
management, such as Google Suite and Slack, as well as platforms for data and
inventory management such as Benchling and Quartzy. A digital platform that
allowed community biolab users to access and communicate information about lab
resources including equipment, materials, researcher schedules, and datasets
might go some way to alleviating some of the challenges faced by community
biolab users. However, it is unclear whether the value provided by such a
resource would be sufficiently compelling to community biolab users to justify
the required level of coordinated action to create and maintain it. Therefore,
we believe that HCI researchers could play a key role in establishing systems
that support non-traditional and cooperative technoscientific work.

##  6\. Conclusion

In this research, we set out to understand the contemporary realities of
DIYbio through community biolabs as shared spaces of practice. By studying 11
different community biolabs, we found that lab members engaged in a variety of
laboratory biology projects using shared infrastructure and community vetting
of project safety. These projects ranged in focus and method, and included
bioart and work on local environmental concerns. We found that community
biolabs are well-supplied to take on these projects with donated or cheaply
sourced second-hand equipment from professional life science laboratories. We
encountered a few examples of lab users building DIY equipment for a range of
reasons including the educational value of fabrication activities, as well as
the novel possibilities afforded by custom equipment. However, we did not find
DIY equipment to be a key enabling activity in the community biolabs. Despite
the differences in project materials, equipment, goals, and motivations, the
community biolab users and managers that we interviewed were nearly unanimous
in their insistence that no alternative places existed where they could engage
in this work. The main constraints we found that lab members faced with
respect to project work had more to do with collaboration challenges, time
constraints and the realities of working with living organisms, rather than
lack of equipment or cost. Based on our findings, we argue that community
biolabs are vital, dynamic, well-resourced places where DIYbio practices are
being developed and deployed every day. We believe that these sites offer an
alternative to the status quo of life science laboratories. In community
biolabs, cutting-edge bioscience equipment, materials, and expertise are found
free from constraints of the professional laboratory. Therefore, we are
hopeful that community biolabs are places where we might “stay with the
trouble” (Haraway and Endy, 2019). Based on our research, we believe that HCI
can support these sites of practice by considering the design of systems that
can support ad hoc collectives pursuing complex and time-sensitive work for
knowledge-making. https://www.overleaf.com/project/624f35f8898fd7021d7513f0

###### Acknowledgements.

We would like to thank all participants in this study both for generously
offering their time to participate and for the work they do to imagine and
build new systems of biotechnoscience framed around access and altruism. We
especially thank community biolabs who participated: Biotech Without Borders
(biotechwithoutborders.org), Boslab (boslab.org), BUGSS (bugssonline.org),
Cambridge Biomakespace (biomake.space), Counter Culture Labs
(counterculturelabs.org), Hive Biolabs (kumasihive.com/hive-biolab), London
Biohackspace (biohackspace.org), Open Science Network (opensciencenet.org),
ReaGent (reagentlab.org), SoundBio (sound.bio), Spira, Inc. (spirainc.com),
TriDIYBio (tridiybio.org). Cartoon graphics used in figures were created using
BioRender.com. We thank the Gordon and Betty Moore Foundation for supporting
this research.

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