Tobie Kerridge: Debating Biotechnology – Speculative Design as Public Engagement [EN]

This speech will describe the "Material Beliefs" project, a design research project with a focus on a speculative approach to biotechnology as a form of engagement with the public.

1 Material Beliefs

I will use a prototype from the project called the Neuroscope as a brief example of this approach. The Neuroscope is networked to neuronal cells in a lab. When a user interacts with the device at home, the cells in the lab are stimulated and the image viewed in the device is updated. This loop between the home and the lab leads to discussions about biological appliances, and new ways of mixing the domestic and the medical.

2 Speculative design, upstream engagement

I start with some background to this speculative approach to design, with examples of work from William Gaver and Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby. I then offer some context to the term public engagement, which can take the form of a policy (which often deals retrospectively with the effects of technology) or as an upstream mode of engagement (which happens at much earlier stage of research). I will explore how these two practices -°©‐ speculative design and public engagement – have come together, and hope to frame some implications for our discussion of care.

3 Visiting biotech labs

I introduce a biomedical lab, which was a site of fieldwork, and the silicon devices that are being developed there. An interview with a lab director shows us how bodies and silicon are brought together to build biomedical applications. I then show two examples where non-°©‐experts are invited into the lab, a group of interaction students and a diabetic patient, and discuss how these lay forms of knowledge come together with scientific methods in a mixed form of knowledge. In this way the original applications are disrupted and alternative situations are introduced.

4 Vital Signs - Designing speculatively

I focus one a technology called the digital plaster as a source of discussion that then developed into a speculative prototype. While the original technology is a biometric monitor for a patient with high blood pressure, these research entities are subject to external interpretation and desires. An example in the UK is a concern about child safety, and I show a short clip of a mother and an engineer who discuss how the daughter could be tracked. I discuss a prototype called Vital Signs that develops the Digital Plaster as a platform that materializes the mother’s concerns. I show that it is interesting to make a functioning prototype, and provide some development details.

5 Examples of public events

In this section I discuss how such speculative designs go out into public settings and do forms of engagement. I show three sites, an evening discussion in a science center, a product design exhibition and an online forum. Each makes a different point about how those involved configure and format the work in different ways, and that the speculative designs can open up the ground for such opportunities, and thereby better enable discussion about emerging biomedicine.

6 Implications for care and disruptive innovation

Finally I make some closing remarks that concludes the material in relation to the theme of disruptive care. I draw upon each phase of Material Beliefs: Labs as sites for reformatting biomedicine, speculative design for materializing and developing technologies as they impinge upon individual and unexpected attitudes towards care; and public spaces as opportunities for extending and challenging both the initial and the speculative applications so that debate can take place and within this care is seen as an outcome of relational knowledge rather than something that is ‘provided’.