This year’s TU Delft iGEM human practices team takes a step outside of the lab to ensure that our project SPYKE is a responsible innovation that will help in the battle against GHB spiking. To make a responsible innovation, it is essential to get a good understanding of the problem and the desired solution. To carefully decide on which technical design to implement in our product, it is important to conduct an analysis of the different actors, their values and norms, and the possible conflicting values between those actors. We approached this through a value-sensitive design.

Once the value-sensitive design was set up, we started sending out emails to get in touch with different actors for our project. And with success … we have already conducted various interviews with experts from drug institutes and governmental organizations. This has already started to shape our project. We are really excited about these first new insights and we hope that this will help to make a GHB sensor that contributes to the battle against spiking in the best possible way.