Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg is a designer, artist and writer exploring the social, ethical and cultural implications of emerging technologies, especially synthetic biology. Daisy is Design Fellow on the international research project, Synthetic Aesthetics (Stanford University/ University of Edinburgh), investigating the shared territory between synthetic biology, art and design. more...
News
PopTech 2011 - "The World Rebalancing"
Speaker: "The Changing Nature of Things"
USA, October 19-22 2011
Synthesis Workshop - website live!
Curator/editor
A one-week exchange laboratory in partnership with The Arts Catalyst, Synthetics Aesthetics, UCL & SymbioticA, with accompanying 100-page handbook
UCL, London, July 4 - July 9 2011
Designs on Nature
Article by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, in the RSA Journal, UK
Winter 2011
Curious Minds: New Approaches in Design
Group Exhibition, The Israel Museum
Jerusalem, December 16, 2011-April 30, 2012
World Technology Award (Design)
United Nations, New York
I won the World Technology Award for Design at a ceremony at the United Nations in New York last week!The nominations are based on those "doing the innovative work of 'the greatest likely long-term significance' in their fields. More info.
October 2011
Index Awards
E. chromi is a finalist in the Index: Design to Improve Life awards!
Copenhagen, September 2011
Exhibition to 2013
States of Design 07: Bio-design
Text by Paola Antonelli. Edited by Francesca Picchi
Domus 952, November, 2011
Talk to Me
Exhibition, Museum of Modern Art, New York
July 24–November 7 2011
E. chromi
TEDGlobal 2011 "The Stuff of Life"
Speaker
Edinburgh, July 2011
What If?
Beijing International Design Triennal
National Museum of China, Beijing
September 28 - October 17 2011
Photo: Dunne & Raby
Growth Assembly, The Synthetic Kingdom, E. chromi
Visions of Synthetic Biology
Feature by Sara Reardon
Science Vol. 333 no. 6047 pp. 1242-1243 September 2, 2011
Read here
Variable Future
Exhibition, Bòlit, Contemporary Art Centre of Girona, Spain
June 30–September 18 2011
Growth Assembly
20 Designers who will Influence Design in the Next Decade
by Alice Rawsthorn & Paola Antonelli
Rolling Stone Italia Design Special Issue, April 5 2011
Brit Insurance Designs of the Year 2011 Nomination
Design Museum, London
Exhibition: February 16- August 2011
E. chromi
E. chromi wins Best Documentary at Bio:Fiction
Bio:Fiction Science, Art & Film Festival
Natural History Museum, May 14 2011, Vienna
Hyperlinks: Architecture & Design
Exhibition, The Art Institute of Chicago, USA
Dec 11 2010 - July 20 2011
Growth Assembly
Synthetic Creations
Article by Maria Popova
Wired UK, January 2011
Synthetic Aesthetics Design Workshop
Workshop, International Genetic Engineered Machines Competition 2010, MIT
Curated & organised by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg
Synthetic Aesthetics Seminar
Form Follows Evolution, Function or Fashion
Seminar, MIT Media Lab
Curated & organised by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg & Orkan Telhan, MIT
Art Science Bangalore Team
Design Advisor, International Genetic Engineered Machines Competition 2010, MIT
James King and and I were very happy to continue our role as design advisors to the amazing team of art and design students led by Yashas Shetty. See their project: Synthetic/Post-Natural Ecologies
Nature Medicine: Fresh as a Daisy
Article on Biomedical Art by Paola Antonelli
Nature Medicine 16, 942 2010
Field Reports on Design & Synthetic Biology, Part 2
Lecture, Columbia School of Architecture, NYC, USA (Synthetic Aesthetics) October 12 2010
Masterclass: Designing Evolution
Keynote, Picnic 2010 Festival, Amsterdam, NL
September 24 2010
E.chromi
Guerilla Science at Secret Garden Party 2010
James King and I presented E.chromi in yoghurt form as an interactive synthetic biology session called PINK MY POOP. Guerilla Science let us loose to tell fictions as part of their fantastic programme at the Secret Garden Party music festival. Gastro-intestinal t-shirts and technicolour poop jokes were suprisingly effective to get people questioning the potential impact of synbio on their everyday lives. More photos...
Synthetic Kingdom Iterations
July 2010
New iterations of theTree of Life based on discussions about the Synthetic Kingdom during the past year.
Design Workshop ArtScienceBangalore IGEM 2010
Srishti School of Art, Design and Technology
June 2010 I'm in Bangalore running a workshop with James King, Yashas Shetty and the ArtScienceBangalore team competing in the International Genetically Engineered Machine competition! Daily updates on our wiki.
Image - student model of The Glandotransius
Nucleic Acids Research
The Synthetic Kingdom on the cover of the Special Edition on Synthetic Biology
Nucleic Acids Research Vol 38 No. 8, May 2010
They Go Round and Round
Exhibition, 0047 Gallery, Oslo, Norway
April 23 - May 23 2010
Growth Assembly
Wellcome Trust Windows
The Synthetic Kingdom, Growth Assembly and E.chromi are exhibited on London's Euston Road, curated by Dunne & Raby until July 2010.
Science and DesignFeature by Mun-Keat Looi, Wellcome Trust Blog, March 2010
The Well-Oiled Machine
A synthetic biology science fiction short story by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg & Oron Catts. Icon Magazine The Fiction Issue (Issue 080) February 2010
E. chromi wins iGEM 2009!
November 2009
A design project with James King in collaboration with the winning iGEM 2009 Cambridge University team.
Project details at www.echromi.com.
My article about our experiences at iGEM for Wired UK.
SymbioticA Residency
September - December 2009
A three-month a residency at SymbioticA, the art and science collaborative research laboratory at the University of Western Australia, designing a Synthetic Biology Protocol.
Funded by Australian Bicentennial Fellowship, Kings College London.
I'll be writing up my research here: Designing Evolution.
iGEM 2009 Crash Course in Synthetic Biology
July 2009, Cambridge University
I spent two weeks thrown into the lions mouth... Jim Haseloff of Cambridge University invited me to join Cambridge's iGEM crash course in Synthetic Biology, led by plant scientist Haseloff, pathologist Dr Jim Ajioka and computer scientist Dr Gos Micklem
iGEM, now in its sixth year, is a summer-long synthetic biology competition for undergraduates around the world, supported by leading university faculty. Teams design new standard interchangeable biological DNA parts - BioBricks - for the Registry of Standard Biological Parts and devise new biological systems to be inserted into living cells. 2009 will see over one hundred and twenty teams converging on MIT for the three-day Championship Jamboree. Unusually, projects devised by undergraduates feed back into scientific development, resulting in papers published in prominent journals and significant further research.
For the inter-disciplinary undergraduate team where physicists, engineers and mathematicians outnumber the biologists, two weeks is sufficient time to learn the principles of biology. This reflects one of the ultimate ambitions of synthetic biology: to separate the microscopic intricacies of molecular biology from the macroscopic process of designing new applications. It seems the future is here, before most of us have heard of it.
The iGEM team's next step is to begin the three-month challenge of designing life. The first question, is of course, ‘What shall we design?’
The intensive exposure I received on the Cambridge iGEM course - from micro-fluidics to biological modeling to entrepreneurship, brainstorming potential projects and practical laboratory work - brought a far deeper insight into synthetic biology’s potentials. Now to apply it!
Huge thanks to Jim Haseloff, Jim Ajioka, Gos Micklem, Duncan Rowe and James Brown.