Biocracy Booklet

BIOCRACY_HOW CAN SPECULATIVE DESIGN INFORM POLICY-MAKING?

BIOCRACY

KRATIA - POWER

TEKHNE - CRAFT

FROM GREEK

FROM GREEK

BIOS - LIFE

DEMOS - PEOPLE

FROM GREEK

FROM GREEK

“What human beings are and will become is decided in the shape of our tools no less than in the action of statesmen and political movements. The design of technology is thus an ontological decision fraught with political consequences. The exclusion of the vast majority from participation in this decision is profoundly undemocratic”

Andrew Feenberg, Transforming Technology, 2002

INDEX

0. INTRODUCTION

1. THEORY & PRECEDENTS

1.1 AN INTRODUCTION TO SPECULATIVE DESIGN 1.2 BEYOND SPECULATIVE _ ANTICIPATORY POLICY MAKING 2. SYNTHETIC BIOLOGY_ OPPORTUNITIES

3. APPROACH _ TOOLS & METHODS

4. PROJECT

4.1 PROPOSAL 4.1.1 DEVICES 4.1.2 INTERFACE 4.1.3 MATERIALS / LANGUAGE 4.1.4 AGORA / LAB 4.1.5 DELIVERY

4.2 STRATEGY

5. REFERENCES

0. INTRODUCTION

This small booklet does not ambition to be a concluded document, but a work-in-progress document to be scribbled, edited and read.Just like design, in books and in texts, there is a craft in the words, format, pictures and aesthetics.

This pretends to be just that - a journal, a mark, one of the iterations that follow this project.Therefore, it is distributed, either physically or digitally for all the participants to be part, not just the result, but also of the open-process.

This over view is a sum-up of all the points, all the components and layers that built this project until now and the ideas - ideals?- for the future.

Thank you for your collaboration,

J

NOW

PROJECT 1

PROJECT 2

1st FUTURE

2nd FUTURE

3rd FUTURE

*

**

* - SCENARIO 1** - SCENARIO 2

- FEEDBACK

time

reality

MOD

EL

WHAT IS IT?

WHAT IF _

1.1 AN INTRODUCTION TO SPECULATIVE DESIGN \ DESIGN FOR DEBATE

REVITAL COHEN , Life Support, 2008

DUNNE & RABY, 2013

“What we are interested in is the idea of possible futures using them as tools to better understand the present and to discuss the kind of future people want, and, of course, ones that people do not want.”

Speculative Design was a therm introduced by Anthonny Dunne and Fiona Raby in 2013 following the publishing of the book “Speculative Everything” by the MIT press.

The therm Speculative Design stands for what-if projects, embracing the hability of Design to synthetize and materialize research into scenarios, allowing the viewers to engage in alternative realities.

This process allows reality to become more malleable by encouraging people to question how future everydayness could be different.

Its design to ask questions, rather than provide answers.

By these means, design will allow us to question the status-quo and to develop alternative social imageries that can open new perspectives on the challenges facing us.

EXAMPLES - DESIGN AND MEDICAL\SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH

LIFE SUPPORT

Assistance animals – from guide dogs to psychiatric service cats – unlike computerised machines, can establish a natural symbiosis with the patients who rely on them. Could animals be transformed into medical devices?

This project proposes using animals bred commercially for consumption or entertainment as companions and providers of external organ replacement.

REVITAL COHEN , Genetic Heirloom, 2010

2. BIOTECHNOLOGY_OPPORTUNITIES

Jack Stilgoe, Managing Innovation: Managing the Responsible Emergence of Science and Innovation in Society, 2013

“There are reasons why the world’s combined innovative capacity has spewed forth Iphones and space shuttles but not yet managed to produce clean energy or universal access to clean water.”

Biotechnology is the aspiring to be the new Industrial Revolution. With the developments of fields such as Synthetic Biology now we begin to engineer nature, appearing in the media as a promise for Bio-fuels, new therapeutical systems, Antibiotics, Cancer treatment or even swaping assembly lines for growing processes, machines, for biological components.

This is with great promised embraced by society, further disengaged with nature which sees in these technologies an opportunity for a Biophilia.

Nevertheless, we must consider the cases of Monsanto and GMO’s.With this promising technology also comes ethical challenges and social implications.The mass opinion tends to divide between absolutes and engaging the public begins to be a requirement for technology and the audience to co-evolve, meeting expectations, needs, but also understanding its timing, our fears, hopes and values.

But for a long time, Science has been an authoritative institution not to be challenged.Closed inside of the Lab, Science might have take themselves out of the responsabilities for what they create and its societal implications.

Briging this discipline to the Agora has been increasiengly discussed by different authors, trying to re-think science, a new model for responsible innovavtion and for a collective interdisciplinary practice.

This project argues that design plays a role in these approaches.Design as long been a discipline that understood human behaviours and projecting their needs into things by working collaboratively, managing between experts and the public.

I believe that those skills are at the heart of the redesign of the future Scientific pratice.

1.2 BEYOND SPECULATIVE _ ANTICIPATORY POLICY MAKING

HOW?

WHAT?

“The difference between having enough knowledge to create a new bio-system and having enough knowledge to fully grasp all possible interactions and its complete set of behavioural characteristics, is exactly what makes the difference for a sustainable and safe development.”MARCUS SCHMIDT, DO I UNDERSTAND WHAT I CREATE?, 2009

This project pretends to propose a model to close the gap of the Design Fiction.Since it’s purpose it is to assemble de Debate, by raising questions to the audience, this project argues that there is value in the debate, and that this debate around our indiviual and collective stories, fears, hopes, values and beliefs should be captured.These captions of narratives could possibly hold extreme value either for the developers of the technology, as a technogical acessment, and to policy-makers to provide deeper insights into anticipatory policy making. By connecting Designers, Scientists, Policy-Makers in the public in a refelective space, this project aims to breed a new symbiotic system between practices.

In a world successfully engaged in expertise and raised boundaries between practices, may be lacking of the naivety and the generalist approach that design practice has to offer to recreate multi-disciplinary links and erect bridges or even highways, of collaborative methods.

Afterall, the success of the industrial designer has been the ability to connect marketeers, engineers, manufacturers and understand and create public desire.Nevertheless recently the design practice has also expanded into a less capitalist approach of its practice towards a more social one.

By borrowing the methods of social design and combining with the possiblities that the speculative design praxis has created, we can move towards a model of iterative social futures, continuously created by the pluratity of points-of-view not just across disciplines but also across time, organizing a system for iterative reflection on how socio-cultural-political issues change with technological developments.

“The designer is better equipped as a generalist, in contrast with the scientist (...) who is a specialist, an expert in detail of how things work, not whom they work for.”DAISY GINSBERG, SYNTHETIC AESTHETICS, 2014

PROPOSED MODEL

WHY

NOW

?

Natalie Jeremijenko, 2008

3. APPROACH_TOOLS & METHODS

CULTURAL PROBES One user is given tasks to undertake, or the same probes may be given to a selection of users. Probes can be placed in an environment to collect information more generally from users of that environment, to record aspects of their lives autonomously, independent of the designer.

DREAMSCAPINGAn insight method aimed at eliciting the emotional relationship between user and objects through the use of purposeful ambiguity and abstract questioning, to engage in unknown territory.

ETHNOGRAPHYQualitative research method centered upon direct and sustained interaction with people in the context of their daily lifes.

WORKSHOPS

MACGUFFINA term attributed to Hitchcock, the MacGuffin is a cinematic plot device, usually an object, that serves to set and keep the story in motion despite lacking intrinsic importance.

RCA, Designing with people

NOAM TORAN, McGuffin Library, 2008

COUNTERFACTUAL

‘see what might have happened, if ... it is sometimes used in history to understand the importance of key events and their influence on how the world turned out’

WICKED SCENARIO

A wicked problem is a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. The use of term “wicked” here has come to denote resistance to resolution.

SCENARIO BUILDINGScenarios are storylines that explore how people might interact with a particular design or context of use. By provoking discussion, they help to develop and evaluate ideas. This method enables concepts to be tested from a human and experiential point of view.

BLACK MIRROR , National Athem, 2011

JAMES CHAMBERS , Attenborough Design Group, 2010Matt Malpass , Ethnography & Dreamscaping

WHA

T?

VIDEOEXPLANAINING THE PROJECT

4.1 PROPOSAL_BIOCOMPUTER

The BioComputer was an idea crafted by John C. Lilly. Although Lilly’s theories are connected to the spiritualism and metaphysic, it opened a space for reflection about our body has Hardware or how was later called - Wetware. This idea of the Biocomputer might be crossing the metaphysical to a feaseable era.Scientific advancements are programming and engineering bacteria, writting DNA codes, and breeding synthetic life. These micro components - the microbiomes - outnumber our human genome sequence - DNA - by 10 times more.These might be the needed components for a nano-bio computer running in our veins.The possibilities are endless, but also the risks.

The possibility of reprogramming our body might be one of the biggest questions of our century to be answered in the following years.

Engaging this possibility before-hand can bring deeper insights into our values, ethics, fears, hopes and dreams. This can provoke insights and changing directions in scientific research, providing qualitative research towards anticipatory policy making and public engagement, widening participation and awareness of the technoogical opportunities and challenges that face ahead.

Although a lot of research as been done and it is possible to read inumerous scientific papers that mention this idea, the picture, the probes,the diegetic protoype, the scenario and the narrative for this BioComputer remaisn to be designed.

Therefore, I believe this is a great opportunity to reflect on the applications and the implications of a major (bio) technological development.

BLOOD VESSELWetwareCircuit Board

BioComputerWet.Cirtuit

BioSensorTransmitter

BIOCOMPUTER

09

Ner

ve C

ells

Mus

cle

Cel

l

B.C

ell

Stem

cel

ls

SOFTWAREStem Cell

b.IOSOperating System

BioNetworkUsers

BioNet Cloud

Data Server

NHSBIO.MEDICAL

CENTER

Personal Area NetworkInterface

Wireless Transmission

4.1.1 PROPOSAL_DEVICES / PROBES

These are work-in-progress renderings, mockups, embodied ideas of objects, devices, probes at an early stage of design development.

The BioComputer, as any configurable system, it is translated in a series of devices that interconnect.

To follow the idea of the BioComputer, replacing the Hardware to Wetware - the body, the methaphors are developed as a every-day computer, in order to make the concept accessible and widen participation.Folowing this Logic, if the body is the hardware it means it should be installed a software. This first software can be seen as the operating system (7). It is installed by running through your circulatory system - the veins this allows the bIOS complete circulation around the body and consequently permanent access to all organs and extensions of the body simultaneously.Later a device (4) is used to install in your body a BioSensor, a bug (2) that is injected in the navel cavity.This locations allow the device to be positioned in the center of the body, with easy access to blood circulation for fast data reading and to be protected against potential outside threats. This bug its the interface between the hosting body and the other bodies in the BioNetwork.

1. Sleeve texture - This is a developed texture created to spread evenly the Liquid IOS through the

sleeve.

2. Bug - This device is a BioSensor. It is connected to the Wifi allowing the BioComputer to be connected

to the BioNetwork.

3. Detail - Bug ready to be Injected in the Injection device see image 4

4. Injection Device - Encloses and injects the Bug onto the hosting body.

5. Sleeve - Placed in the arm of the hosting body, it allows the bIOS to penetrate the circulatory system

and terefore install itself.

6. Kit Case - The kit comes in a safe case, ensuring temperature protection, anti-pathogen contamination

and safe storage.

7. bIOS - Assembled bIOS device with hook to be easily attached at any home.

PARTS

RESUME

1 2

3 4 5

6 7

PLACE INJECTION BELTPlace opening on navel cavity ensuring confort and hygiene

INJECTION BUTTONPress firmly the button for injection

BIOSENSOR DEVICEPlace BioSensor

OUTPUT

BioSensorREMOTE ACESS & CONNECTION

INSTALLATION IN PROGRESS

TIGHT FIT

b.IOSb.IOS

OPERATING SYSTEM

1. PLACE HOOK

3. PLUG TUBESMake sure they face no obstacles or sharp edges

4. CONNECT b.IOSUse the appropriate connection for the armband

5. PLACE ARMBANDPlease follow diagram 1.2

2. PLACE BAG VERTICALLYThis is your b.IOS please hand it carefully

4.1.2 PROPOSAL_INTERFACE

These images represent the mood-board and the challenge of designing an Interface that at usually is deeply constrained by a technical language and extensively detailed information.This language is a code. Its codifyied information, fully understood for certain practices but mostly unknown for the every-day citizen.

The challenge here is to make it acceptable, but to a point we can still feel the mixed-feelings, the doubts of loosing privacy, the pervasion of our body has a Hardware, as a Machine or as Data.

1. How far can we take the screens? - Making this project involves thinking about our interfaces in the

future. The problem sits on how far can we take the audience, makign them able to still project their

emotions by connecting with the scenario.

2. Visuals - How will medical laguage be domesticated? One of the major steps that led people to

connect so deeply with the idea of personal computer was the introduction to colors and friendly

typefaces.

3. How can the future domestic version of high-specialist medicine will look like? Will we all be experts?

4. How will the BioNetwork be monotorized? Hospitals will loose their importance but controlling a wide

Network would need a different setting.

5. Medical controllers tend to aesthetically reinforce its technicallity, reinforcing the seperation from

consumer technologies. How will the controls/interface look like?

6. Is there something enjoyable and frightening at the same time about medical language?

7. How will the interface translate into something physical? It is important to keep the medical laguage but

also domesticate it to fit our homes.

IMAGES & QUESTIONS

RESUME

1 2

3

4

5 6

7

resample(x[x > 8]) # length 2resample(x[x > 9]) # length 1resample(x[x > 10]) # length 0

BIOCOMPUTER

000.0

100

0.01

000.0

100

0.01

000.0

100

0.01

000.0

100

0.01

000.0

100

0.01

000.0

100

0.01

000.0

100

0.01

000.0

100

0.01

LEVEL 0.01 PATHOGEN - INDENTIFIED

BPM(avg): 56.94PREASSURE

BETA: 14.62 Hz

STATUS - INFECTED

STATUS - UPDATING

STATUS - CLEAR

STATUS - CLEAR

0.01

0.55

0.65

0.75

0.85

0.95

1.05

0.02 0.03 0.04 0.05 0.06 0.07 0.08 0.09

UPDATED AT 11:00VERIFIED - X100.9

STATUS - COMPLETE

09

00

16

sample(x, size, replace = FALSE, prob = NULL)ample.int(n, size = n, replace = FALSE, prob = NULL, useHash = (!replace && is.null(prob) && size <= n/2 && n > 1e7))

resample(x[x > 8]) # length 2resample(x[x > 9]) # length 1resample(x[x > 10]) # length 0

4.1.3 PROPOSAL_ MATERIALS / LANGUAGE

Materiality play an important role in this project - tactile and semiotic.The materilogy have been one of the epicenters of Biotechnology to the public, mostly due to their human scale and their relationship with the body.In this project these languages have to be carefully crafted in subtleness to achieve plurality and compexity of issues discussed.Therefore, to create the narrative of the BioComputer, Medical, Scientific and Engineering language should enter the daily life of the citizen, the consumer, the host of this fictional product.In order to do so these languages also need to be domesticated.However, in order to achieve a certain distance and the contrasts between familiarity/strangeness, caring/possessing, biological/machine, body/instrument, to name a few;The language proposed to be employed trough these material semiotic it is also a combination of the laguage often employed in weapons.

This breeds a conflicting language that is coded in the intersection between three identified languages. The medical, the domestic and the language of the weapons.

MEDICAL

WEAPO

NDOMESTIC

RESUME

LANGUAGES LANSCAPE

CONFLICTING LANGUAGES

1 & 2. Aesthetic of Biology?

3. Biotech - Materials

4. CAD Biology

5. Technical Aesthetics - Monuments

6. Kronenberg - Dystopia?

7. Surgery or Weapons - Technical Laguages

8. Weapons Language

IMAGES & QUESTIONS

1 2

3

4 5 6

7

8

4.1.4 PROPOSAL_COLLECT FEEDBACK ALL TOMORROW’S HEADLINES ALL TOMORROW’S HEADLINES

ALL TOMORROW’S HEADLINESThis exercise puts you in the position of the journalist. What fears, stories and desires would be highlited?

Write in the Guardian cover how would you make the BioComputer news!

This exercise puts you in the position of the journalist. What fears, stories and desires would be highlited?




Share it with your friends!#BioComputer#TomorrowHeadlines



http://joaobiocracy.tumblr.com/ [email protected] http://joaobiocracy.tumblr.com/ [email protected] http://joaobiocracy.tumblr.com/ [email protected]

ALL TOMORROW’S HEADLINES


ALL TOMORROW’S HEADLINESThis exercise puts you in the position of the journalist. What fears, stories and desires would be highlited?






Share it with your friends!

#BioComputer#TomorrowHeadlines






















These objects are flyers to be distributed during engagement.They are designed to collect feedback, by provoking the viewers with a question in the scenario in which the BIOCOMPUTER is released to the public:

What fears stories and desires would be highlited?

This allows people to communicate by putting them in the role of a journalist creating a headline for a newspaper. The question is created so there is a - but . This contradiction/ opistion is created so that participants can express contradictory and often conflicting views upon this wicked scenario.

After the moment of engagement participants are asked to take their views into the digital realm, by using social media such as Instagram to spread debate into digital engagement.These posts are gathered and assessed later on, providing the chance to collect participants views, but also online discussion, and feedback.

This step is crutial to collect this qualitative research and feedback industrial, government and cultural institutions.

RESUME

4.1.5 PROPOSAL_ AGORA / LAB

This is the primarily sketches of a space. This space is a Laboratory.This space is built not on its limits but on its openess. It is a free space of dialogue and debate.

A laboratory of toughts.

It stands as a struture. But it is a game. A puzzle.The interactions with the space and the objects inside complete the missing pieces.To play you must be an actor, an observer, an investigator.

What do we find out?Our stories, fears, hopes and desires.

Maybe then we can think together about the future we might want.

NENDO, 2012

4.1.5 PROPOSAL_DELIVERY REPORTHow can ethics and complex problems of public matter be engaging?

Design can be a powerful tool to engage public in creative consultations.In this project, I also believe that the reports generated by this qualitative data should also engage the public to review and further discuss these different visions.

By clustering feedback of diferents opinions, we can reach public visions, collective stories that were provoked by the first engagement. These stories could be translated into scenarios - movies - of how we expect our everyday to be transformed by this technology. This allows for the parallel narration of our complexity, sharing positive and negative views of the same probes.

These videos allow also the public to review the engagement and to further extend the debate into social media, allowing government and institutions to assess the reports, creating a second iteration of the feedback collected.

For Institutions, either private or public it is an opportunity to open an internal debate on how to prevent or stimulate these scenarios, creating a space for complex, qualitative research engagement.

This does not mean a replacement of the consultancy report but another element for review.

By appling this strategy, the project aims to take difficult, complex and often disengaging issues of our society into mainstream channels, allowing the public to better participate in the democratic process.

RESUME

PUBLICGOVERNMENT

PRIVATEINDUSTRIES

VIDEOSSCENARIOS

REPORTQUALITATIVE DATA

PUBLIC

4.3 STRATEGY

3. EVERY CITIZEN IS AN EXPERT

5. DIAGLOGUE

6. FEEDBACK

2. ENGAGE THE EXPERTS

1. COLLABORATION

SYMBIOSIS

σύν (together) + βίωσις (living) From greek

Interaction between two different organisms living in close physical association, typically to the advantage of both. Mutually beneficial relationship between different people or groups.

5. REFERENCES

Beaver, J., Kerridge, T. and Pennington, S. (2009). Material beliefs. London: Goldsmith's, University of London.

Costa, B. and Philip, K. (2008). Tactical biopolitics. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

Dunne, A. and Raby, F. (n.d.). Speculative everything.

Ginsberg, A., Calvert, J., Schyfter, P., Elfick, A. and Endy, A. (n.d.). Synthetic aesthetics.

Kac, E. (2007). Signs of life. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

Malpass, M. (2015). Criticism and Function in Critical Design Practice. Design Issues, 31(2), pp.59-71.

Manzini, E. (n.d.). Design, when everybody designs.

Myers, W. (2012). Bio design. New York: Museum of Modern Art.

Owen, R. (2013). Responsible Innovation. Wiley.

Page, R. (n.d.). Bio-punk.

Rabinow, P. and Bennett, G. (n.d.). Designing human practices.

Schmidt, M. (2006). Public will fear biological accidents, not just attacks. Nature, 441(7097), pp.1048-1048.

Schmidt, M. (2009). Synthetic biology. Dordrecht: Springer.

Thacker, E., Jones, D., Bunting, H. and Jeremijenko, N. (2005). Creative biotechnology. Newcastle upon Tyne: Locus+ Publishing.

Lindley, Joseph, Dhruv Sharma, and Robert Potts. 'Anticipatory Ethnography: Design Fiction As An Input To Design Ethnography'. Ph.D. Lancaster University UK, 2015. Print.

Feenberg, Andrew. Critical Theory Of Technology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1991. Print.

Latour, Bruno, and Steve Woolgar. Laboratory Life. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1986. Print.

Bijker, Wiebe E, Thomas Parke Hughes, and T. J Pinch. The Social Construction Of Technological Systems. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1987. Print.

Nowotny, Helga, Peter Scott, and Michael Gibbons. Re-Thinking Science. Cambridge, UK: Polity, 2001. Print.

Haraway, Donna Jeanne. Simians, Cyborgs, And Women. New York: Routledge, 1991. Print.

Marek, Adam. Instruction Manual For Swallowing. Toronto: ECW Press, 2012. Print.

W. Patton, Jason, and Edward Woodhouse. 'Design By Society: Science And Technology Studies And The Social Shaping Of Design'. Design Issues 20.3 (2015): n. pag. Print.

Central Saint Martins UAL /// MA Industrial Design

[email protected]

16 Nov 15

Biocracy Booklet

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