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BioDesign Studio: Living Colors Lab

Visitors use tangible tokens to program bacteria to express pigment; successful designs accumulate on an RGB dot wall with a live count of dishes grown.

A researcher in a black top and blue nitrile gloves works at the Living Colors Lab tangible table in BioDesign Studio, moving labware tokens. A wall of small multicolored lights glows in the dark background.
Living Colors Lab, BioDesign Studio, The Tech Interactive, San Jose. Image: Local Projects / The Tech Interactive.
Role
Project Director, Concept, Development Lead, Evaluation
Organization
[The Tech Interactive](https://www.thetech.org/) (institutional), San Jose
Years
2013–2017
Location
San Jose, CA
Category
Biodesign + synthetic biology
Status
Completed

What it is. A station inside BioDesign Studio at The Tech Interactive, the permanent synthetic-biology exhibition that opened March 18, 2016. Visitors handle lab-true tangible tokens to program bacteria to express pigment. Each successful design is added to a large RGB dot wall that keeps a running count of dishes grown, so the room’s collective output is always visible.

The research lineage. The interaction model behind this activity was studied and published as SynFlo with Orit Shaer’s HCI Lab at Wellesley (TEI ‘16). The paper’s framing: the tangible interactions “draw upon the affordances of the labware and imitate physical steps performed by biologists in the lab.” Living Colors Lab is that research as a permanent museum-floor exhibit.

What I did. Project Director, Concept, Development Lead, and Evaluation on the Tech Interactive side; the interactive build was a partnership with Local Projects, with the tangible-interaction research run jointly with Wellesley. The studio overall received AAM Silver MUSE, a D&AD Wood Pencil, and a Core77 Runner-Up in 2017; see the BioDesign Studio page for the full record.

The Living Colors Lab pigment wall: a large grid of red, green, and blue lights forming spiral patterns, with a central counter reading the number of bacterial dishes grown. Visitors work at lit benches below it.
Living Colors Lab pigment wall. Image: Local Projects / The Tech Interactive.

Publications

  • Okerlund, J., Segreto, E., Grote, C., Westendorf, L., Scholze, A., Littrell, R., & Shaer, O. (2016). SynFlo: A tangible museum exhibit for exploring bio-design. Proceedings of TEI '16, 141–149. ACM.

Collaborators

Related projects

  • 2013–2017

    BioDesign Studio

    Permanent exhibition on synthetic biology, with a working biological design lab on the museum floor, tangible-tabletop microbe simulators, live cell-culture stations, and visitor-runnable design tools.

  • 2016

    SynFlo: tangible synthetic-biology exhibit

    ACM TEI '16 paper and Tech Interactive installation exploring tangible interaction for synthetic-biology learning.

  • 2013–2017

    BioDesign Studio: Creature Creation Station

    Visitors combine tangible bio-element tokens at a curved table to design a hybrid synthetic creature, which then animates in a shared projected ecosystem.