A conversation with Suzanne Lee of Biofabricate for the Journal fo Design and Science series Other Biological Futures, curated by Natsai Audrey Chieza and Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg.
Christina Agapakis: At Ginkgo our mission is to make biology easier to engineer. To do that requires deep knowledge of biology and engineering, but it also requires design in a lot of really different ways. We have a design team, but it’s made up of synthetic biologists and protein engineers and computational biologists, not industrial designers, or graphic designers, or UX designers. One thing our design team does is design software tools that make it easier for an organism designer to design DNA, millions of base pairs at a time, which can be synthesized and prototyped in our foundry. Our technical teams are always designing: designing DNA sequences, software, automation systems, and experiments.
But making biology easier to engineer isn’t just a technical challenge because any technology is embedded in and influenced by society. For genetic engineering that means the way people think about GMOs, that means ethics and sustainability, that means how we can even imagine what might be possible in the future and what the implications of that will be for people. How can we design biology well?
When I started working at Ginkgo, I wanted to do this kind of design: focusing on communication, imagination, and aesthetics. But we already had a Design team. So, I named our team Creative, which was really inspired by you, Suzanne!
I joke that my job now is writing emails and making PowerPoint slides, but what motivates everything is communicating complex issues and catalyzing new conversations between lots of different disciplines and different people, which does require PowerPoint sometimes. At Ginkgo, we need to communicate about the power of biology and spark new conversations about how and why biology will be designed. And we’re talking to lots of different people: industries, investors, and consumers. There’s no one way to do that; it can happen through words, images, events, and even the organisms themselves.