OPEN SCIENCE LABS
“Science is simply the systematic accumulation of knowledge based on evidence.”
AN INTRODUCTION
Venki Ramakrishnan (Nobel laureate and President of The Royal Society 2015–2020) said the above quote. Open Science Labs is a product that is intended to make the demonstration and experience of experimental science more accessible to high school students in India.
My role
User Experience Designer
User Researcher
Visual Designer
Deliverables
Lo-fi wireframing
User research
Style guides
Hi-fi wireframing
Tools Used
Figma
ProtoPie
Notion
Timeline
Feb 2023 - Present
60% of students in India do not have access to labs as a part of their high school education.
THE PROBLEM
Creating a remotely controlled experimental setup that allows students to carry out steps firsthand.
THE SOLUTION
The concept is that students will have an app that functions as a remote control for a robot in a laboratory somewhere else. They will be able to control the robot's movements and get a firsthand experience of carrying out the experiment.
There’s two variants of the product: for students and for teachers. With the aide of an app, a student is able to control a remotely present robot, and carry out a science experiment. With the aide of a different version of the app, teachers are able to monitor, grade and enable relevant experiments.
The current way of running science experiments faces two types of challenges: access related and reproducibility related.
WHITE PAPER RESEARCH
Many labs don’t have the funding required to access all the apparatus and equipment needed to run a lab. Researchers and schools also have to repeatedly hire new lab technicians/students and train them to use various instruments.
Secondly, lab procedures are repetitive and tedious. After a lot of trial-and-error iterations, researchers are able to get the desired results. To reach this point, they might have done hundreds of small and large tweaks to the parameters. A survey conducted with 1,576 scientists as participants revealed that 52% of scientists say that their experiments are not reproducible.
Open Science Labs (OSL) aims to solve both of these issues by virtualising the experiment process.
*Note: this research was done by my colleagues.
This product is for high school students and their teachers.
EMPATHISING
To begin any form of design, one needs to put themselves in the place of their users. To do so, I began some desktop research on how a student carries out a lab. I read a variety of 12th standard lab manuals to mostly understand exactly how labs are conducted. With this information under my belt, I started making the first set of wireframes.
This process was perhaps easier for me on account of my having gone through the 12th standard CBSE curriculum, which made it easier to imagine exactly how the students would feel.
I created the first flow with low fidelity wireframes.
IDEATING
This can be viewed via Figma here.
The objective for these preliminary designs was to create a rough flow of events that occur while conducting experiments. I created a full length experiment flow, as well as some helper pages: the profile page, a lab manual, and so on.
NOTE: THIS PROJECT IS IN PROGRESS! DETAILS AND UPDATES WILL BE ADDED AS THEY HAPPEN REAL TIME.