Synthetic Aesthetics is an upcoming program designed to bring 6 synthetic biologists and 6 designers together in a month-long mutually beneficial collaboration. The goal is to to bring together synthetic biologists, social scientists, designers, artists, and other creative practitioners, to explore existing and potential collaborations between synthetic biology and the creative professions.

I have been thinking recently about the design principles of the Arduino microcontroller prototyping platform and wishing for something similar for synthetic biology: a cheap, physical platform designed to help non-experts prototype and play with microbial genetic devices. So I submitted a proposal hoping to find a designer interested in collaborating. Here it is:

The tools of biotechnology are sometimes ready-made and often disposable.  As synthetic biology improves modularization, abstraction, measurement, and design techniques for biological systems, how will the craft of biotechnology change, and what new forms of craft will develop?  How will the character of a biotechnology design studio differ and evolve from that of a contemporary lab space?  As more individuals appropriate synthetic biology techniques for reasons besides research, such as art, tinkering, and play, how will their tools and workspaces evolve?

How can existing synthetic biology tools and techniques themselves be modularized, simplified, and accelerated to make them more accessible to non-experts, such as artists, designers, and tinkerers?

I would like to explore this question with a designer by prototyping hardware platforms that support simpler and faster interaction loops with bacterial genetic devices, facilitating play. I would like to investigate and apply the design principles exemplified in design of the popular Arduino microcontroller to contemporary synthetic biology tasks, such as basic biological part assembly, transformation, and measurement, and develop plausible physical prototypes that make those tasks easier and faster for non-engineers. Additionally, I would like to explore with the designer how the inputs (media, lyophilized cells, DNA, water, other feedstocks, antibiotics) and outputs (cells, growth rate, fluorescence measurements) to this synthetic biology prototyping platform could be modularized and made more user-friendly.

Secondarily, I would like to use the experience gained from developing the prototypes as the basis of several real-world mock-ups of what biotechnology studios of 2020 might look like. These renditions would explore contemporary assumptions about the priorities of biotechnology.  What does the practice and tool-chain of synthetic biology look like when tinkering and play, or art, or brewing, etc, are prioritized over research? What would a radically-sustainable, zero-waste lab look like? Or one constructed solely from rapid-prototyped equipment? How would a microfluidic-arduino and its associated ecosystem of add-ons, users, and code fit in?  Or a standard biological part trading card game?

At the end of the project, I would like to have primarily developed a physical prototype (a conceptually powerful, plausibly-working prototype) of something akin to a synthetic biology arduino, along with consistent designs of its inputs and outputs. Secondarily, I would like to have developed scenes and images representing several future contexts in which this platform would play a role. The tangible manifestations of these potential futures – of synthetic biology and of non-institutional science – will enhance contemporary discourse on the subject and inspire reflection about the path from today to their potential realization.