Writing
Designs on Nature
Article by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg, in the RSA Journal, UK
Winter 2011
The Irrational Genome Design Contest
by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg
Thresholds Issue 38, MIT Department of Architecture, published January 2011
Synthesis Workshop
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
The Biological Turk
by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg
New City Reader, The Last Newspaper Exhibition, New Museum, New York, December 24 2010
Full text
To Form and Multiply by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg
Feature on the role of design in synbio.
Design Indaba magazine, South Africa, 2010.
Icon Magazine The Fiction Issue (Issue 080)
The Well-Oiled Machine
Synthetic biology science fiction short story by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg & Oron Catts. February 2010 (read)
The Synthetic Kingdom
Paper by Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg
Second Nature: International Journal of Creative Media, RMIT, Australia March 2010
Wired.co.uk
Building New Life Forms at the iGEM Jamboree
Report on the International Genetically Engineered Machines Competition, November 09 2009
Microbe Controllers
Human Futures: Art in an Age of Uncertainty
Ed. Andy Miah, Liverpool University Press, 2008
Microbe Controllers
Material Beliefs, Interaction Research Studio, Goldsmiths, University of London, UK, 2009
Design Evolution
Royal College of Art Dissertation
The Biotechnology Revolution could be the biggest force for change in the twenty-first century. But what does design, integral to the developments of the Industrial and Information Revolutions, have to ‘offer’ to the manipulation of living organisms for technological purpose? Could there be a role for designers - untrained in the sex-lives of microbes or the intricacies of RNA transcription - beyond designing the industry’s ephemera?
This was a starting point for my dissertation, which used the microbe as a guide through the different scales of biotech, from microscopic molecular interactions to the vastness of outer space. I explored how design might evolve in the future: while designers may indeed forecast and design new biotech applications, we need a discipline to work between ethics and science, engaging with both the expected and unexpected consequences of technology. Who does this big picture view belong to? An increasingly complex scientific world obscures the macroscopic. Can design claim it, bringing the skills of synthesis, collaboration and tangibility to allow us to address the future?