My name is Alexandra Daisy Ginsburg, or Daisy for short, and I'm an artist and designer
and writer, and I research science, especially synthetic biology, and I've been here speaking
at Design and Darba in 2013. Synthetic biology is a new approach to genetic engineering.
We've been designing biology for 10,000 years or more, so every crop or your pet dog is all
being designed in a way. It's been sort of iterated and iterated by human decisions
into the thing that we want, but the idea behind genetic engineering and now synthetic
biology is that we could get far more control and start moving things across living kingdoms
that haven't necessarily sort of interacted at a genetic level before, so like an anti-freeze
gene from a fish into a tomato to make it cold resistant. That's something that genetic
engineering has done, but synthetic biology, you could imagine pigments from different
colour vegetables into bacteria, and it starts to create whole new opportunities. Back in
2009, I started working with a team of undergraduate students from Cambridge University who are
entering this big competition that's called IGEN, or the International Genetically-Engineered
Machine Competition. It's a competition where thousands of students from around the world
get together to design a bacteria that does something cool. So we were working with students
from Cambridge who were designing bacteria that produce different colour pigments, and
we, I was working with another designer, James King, and we were trying to find how can we
bring the way that we think about design into their design process. So we did workshops
where we imagined future implications of the work, so not just applications, but also how
new groups and laws might emerge from the technology. And the one that everyone likes
is that we imagined about 2039, it would become culturally acceptable to drink like a yakkel
type yoghurt laced with e-chromo bacteria that would start to detect diseases in your
gut, they'd just like live there in your gut after you've drank it, and if you had a disease
they'd start producing a corresponding coloured pigment, and the output is easily accessible.
So Colour Pooh was the thing that everyone has taken from this project, as a new kind
of interface for biological computing. The process of e-chromo and the Scatalog, which
is what this suitcase is called, is quite simple. What's in the suitcase is a mock-up
that we made to actually take with us to the international and genetically engineered machine
competition. We wanted to challenge the scientists and engineers who are actually inventing the
technology with what we thought was an interesting aesthetic response. So they're representing
it as cogs and machine parts, but we were like, this is biology, and we shouldn't be
shy or coy about talking about what's unique about this technology, because if this isn't
what we want from a technology innovation, then what do we want from it?
