BioDesign Studio

What it is. A $5M permanent exhibition at The Tech Interactive (San Jose) built around the proposition that synthetic biology should be visible, hands-on, and design-able by the public, not hidden behind biosafety cabinets and paywalled journals. AAM Silver MUSE (2017), D&AD Wood Pencil (2017), Core77 Runner-Up (2017).

The problem behind it. Biology education at the K–12 and public level had stayed locked in a 1990s model of cell diagrams, agarose gels, and “isn’t DNA cool” framing. Synthetic biology had become a working engineering discipline, but the public encounter with it was still defined by science-fair aesthetics. Meanwhile, an emerging community-bio movement was building real labs in garages and warehouses without an institutional bridge.

What I did. My role on the Tech Interactive side was Project Director, Concept, Development Lead, and Evaluation. The interactive build came from a partnership with Local Projects in New York. The exhibition opened on March 18, 2016. The tabletop tangible work was a direct collaboration with Orit Shaer’s HCI Lab at Wellesley, which produced three peer-reviewed ACM papers with co-authors Anastasia Loparev, Lauren Westendorf, Madeleine Flemings, Jeffrey Cho, and Anja Scholze. MycoWorks contributed content for the mycelium-design tables. The result was a working biological design lab on the museum floor with live cell-culture stations, programmable-bacteria visualizations, tangible-tabletop microbe-design tools, and curated drop-in experiences from real-world bioengineering practice.

Described as the world’s first synthetic biology learning lab, one juror called this installation “brave and daring” for taking on a complex scientific subject and process, and turning it into a visually appealing, engaging learning experience.

— American Alliance of Museums, 2017 MUSE Awards (Silver, Interpretive Interactive Installations). The Core77 jury entry called it “the first permanent exhibition that makes the burgeoning and complex fields of synthetic biology, bioengineering, biological design and DIY biology accessible to the public in an engaging and tangible way.”