Fieldwork Report for the Nucleic Acid Technology Lab: TR-2010-130

The development of new technologies requires an understanding of the social issues technologies would confront when deployed. Such is the case of e-Science solutions like the Mini-Grid, whose future users are molecular biologists. The successful adoption of the Mini-Grid requires its design to account to the existing conditions of the molecular biologists. In this technical report we present the results of an initial fieldwork study of molecular biologists. We present their organization structure, their roles, their tools, their activities, and information management behaviors and collaboration patterns. We identified 4 roles, and a 7-step experiment structure.