Team:ArtCenter MDP/Notebook

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research

Because we are outside of the field of synthetic biology we began by immersing ourselves in it, reading: Rambunctious Garden: Saving Nature is a Post Wild World, J. Craig Venter Institute's Press Release “First Self-Replicating Synthetic Bacterial Cell,” Oron Catts and Gary Cass's “Labs Shut Open: A Biotech Hands-on Workshop for Artists” to name a few. This helped us gain a better understanding of the emerging research and conversations within synthetic biology. Generally everything we read blew our minds, everything was interesting! So this was really our research challenge as designers, where or what can we most effectively contribute to the field? What conversation can we offer another perspective to? Thank you Christina Agapakis and Ben Hooker for sources.

brainstorming

The team collaborated through a series of brainstorming sessions. Each person discussed their research. Through a series of white boarding sessions we developed a set of categories or groupings that helped identify where our research and interests overlapped:

Culture Reserves / Modeling Life:

- human mediation in nature

- the managed wilderness, perpetual weeding, perpetual watching

- generating divergent ecosystems by accident - animals migrate

- conservation, restoration - we recreate it ourselves

- site specific

- what is from scratch?

Ecosystem Design / Rewiliding & De-Exticntion:

- diversity occurs in unfamiliar places

- extremophiles

- “sanctuaries” - designing new ecosystems

- the food chain

- lack of predators

- introduced animals are fenced in

Evolution / Time & Scale:

-a slow learning process, we wish we could speed it up

-compete, react, evolve, migrate and form new

-a balance of life and death

-human time vs microbial time

-what are times for simulation, slow vs fast, the sims

-lab scale vs life scale

-evolution and repercussions

questions

Imagine huge bodies of water, giant ponds and lakes and just below the surface are trillions of organisms working 24/7, eating plant life and producing gasoline. - George Church, envisioning future synthetic biofuel production.

As we developed our concepts certain questions kept coming up for us:

concept development

We developed a concept focusing on previous work in genetically altered algae for the use of biofuel production.

design

The ecosystem surrounding the pool became our site for investigation.

site visits

Based on advice from our advisors, we started to grow our own algae as a way to prototype and simulation our localized fuel production model.

simulation 1

simulation 2

Simulation 2

so.cal. igem meetup

Over the summer Media Design Practices hosted the Southern California iGEM meetup.

observations

You should make use of the calendar feature on the wiki and start a lab notebook. This may be looked at by the judges to see how your work progressed throughout the summer. It is a very useful organizational tool as well.

insights

You should make use of the calendar feature on the wiki and start a lab notebook. This may be looked at by the judges to see how your work progressed throughout the summer. It is a very useful organizational tool as well.