Thesis Musings 2: Potential Pivot and Clarification

Reflection

This week I had some thoughts that might lead me down a path to a clearer thesis topic. I was interviewed by a group of Penn Integrated Product Design grad students about my Biodesign Competition project. At one point, they asked me if I considered myself a biodesigner, and I hesitated, and ultimately said no. Why? I’ll come back to that later.

I studied decision processes and public policy in undergrad. When I graduated in 2010, there were very few jobs called “UX Designer.” In fact, my concentration, Decision Processes, could have easily been renamed “Behavioral Economics,” but that field was also still in its infancy in popular understanding. Yet even as students, we could see how the emerging theories we studied were already shaping software design and policy. “Nudges” were being implemented to set default behaviors when signing up for, say, savings accounts -- something informed by behavioral research. Particular colors were being used to incentivize or disincentive actions. It was increasingly clear that what we were studying was being implemented in practice, both in software and within public policy, and that the field of design was expanding beyond fashion, furniture, hardware, and graphics to include more interdisciplinary philosophies and applications.

Now in 2020, we’ve seen both the bright and dark sides of the influence of behavioral research on product design and policy, and we have an entire industry built around incorporating our academic understanding of behavior into the process of design. “UX Design” is a common job title that has subfields (i.e. “UX research”) and is even a field of study itself now. If I were a Decision Processes student today, I would have a set of obvious jobs to consider upon graduating.

We’re currently at a similar inflection point, I believe, in the field of “biodesign.” There is an emerging set of beliefs, tools, and practices that are loosely tied together with the term “biodesign,” but with a very fluid definition of what it might mean, and few job opportunities explicitly penned. 

A Fast Company article from 2017 says that biodesign is “a growing movement (literally) of scientists, artists, and designers that integrates organic processes and materials into the creation of our buildings, our products, and even our clothing.”  In perhaps the definitive text on the current state of Biodesign, William Myers says that “unlike biomimicry or the popular but vague "green design," biodesign refers to the incorporation of living organisms as essential components in design, enhancing the function of the finished work.” These definitions leave a lot of room for further clarification, and might beg more questions than they answer.

One question that follows immediately: are there “biodesigner” jobs? What does LinkedIn look like when searching “biodesigner?” How does that compare with “UX designer?”

In the “Biodesign” search, there are only a few results with “biodesigner” in the job title, and few companies that are oriented around “biodesign.” UX, on the other hand, has an entirely different page layout given how popular both the title and the field is.

In addition to how biodesign might look on LinkedIn, another few questions might be:

“What philosophies or frameworks might guide a biodesign practice?” 

“What is the equivalent of “Human Centered Design” for biodesign… or are they actually compatible, and biodesign is a discipline, in a different part of the design ecosystem from a framework like HCD?” 

“What would distinguish biodesign from, say, industrial design?”

All of these circle around the bigger question of defining what biodesign is today, where it might go in the future, both pragmatically in the form of jobs, companies, and labels, but also in the form of philosophies that shape how we approach thinking about designing the world around us and around the other life forms we live with.

When I was asked whether I was a biodesigner, I said “no” because I felt the word was too vague; that it could be too easily misconstrued, or misunderstood. I said I might be more comfortable with bio-artist; perhaps because “artist” itself is such a broad, open-ended label at this point, that it could subsume the prefix “bio” without batting an eyelid…

As I reflected about my thought processes and my design processes, however, I noticed that I did have a pattern that might not fit under an “established” design school of thought. I begin my design process with a process of decomposition; of breaking the whole of an entity (a problem, a feeling, a material…) into its constituent parts. I often think about how those parts can be transformed, recombined, recycled into new wholes. I realized that my thought process is informed both by the computer science-y idea of “decomposition” and the biological idea of “decomposition” -- and that with some further thought, I may be able to articulate a philosophy and set of tools for using this sort of decompositional framework for designing -- ideating, prototyping, problem solving.

So, in a nutshell, I may focus my thesis on elaborating on the definition(s) of biodesign, of placing it within the world of existing design school of thought, and then establishing a sub-framework of biodesign of my own, which right now would loosely be described at “Decomposition Design.”

What might this look like:

• Research “paper”

  • Does not need to be entirely written -- could include multimedia, especially video and animation

  • Does not need to be a linear experience for the “reader”

    • There are many questions to answer, and many paths that might follow from the broader question of defining biodesign

  • Should include interviews with people across the biodesign world, broader design world, and lay people who might not currently know what biodesign is/might become

• A series of experiments

  • objects as examples of the schools of thought within biodesign

    • Especially important to do this if I decide to develop/articulate my own design paradigm

    • Schools of thought

      • Resilience design

      • Multi-species-centered design

      • Biomimicry

      • Decomposition design (my framework)

Thesis Musings

I’m at the beginning of my dive into thesis research. We officially began our thesis class at ITP 2 weeks ago, and were asked to write a little bit about what was on our mind.

Prompt: Write a short blog post on the big concept or passion or interest or questions you want to tackle (not the technology).

Yogurt is a food. Yogurt is alive. Yogurt was an accident. Yogurt is intentional. Yogurt is recursive. Yogurt is an archive.  

A spoonful of yogurt might sound like nothing more than an occasional breakfast snack; but what if I told you that within that yogurt, we can find questions and answers touching on everything from experience design to metaphysics; systems architecture to the future of computing?

Yogurt has been in the human diet in various parts of the world for thousands of years. We know it as a tangy, smooth-textured dairy product that is in a distinct class from cheese, milk, kefir, butter, and the rest. We know how it’s made now, too — heat milk, let it cool, add a bit of previous yogurt, give it time, and voila– you’ve got yogurt. But it wasn’t always this simple. 

Yogurt likely began as an accident. It probably went something like this: milk was left outdoors in a hot environment near some plants, where lactobacillus — a lactic acid producing bacteria — was crawling around. That bacteria found its way into the milk and metabolized the lactose in the milk to produce lactic acid. That lactic acid lowered the pH of the milk. The hot environment “cooked” the milk, changing the shape (denaturing) many of the proteins in the milk. The more acidic environment and the denatured proteins encouraged a re-formation of protein networks in the milk. Those new networks of proteins created a firmer texture, and the lower pH gave the milk its tangy taste. Some brave soul took a bite of that substance, liked it, maybe even felt good rather than sick, and perhaps tried to recreate it. Over many centuries and experiments, we now have a relatively reliable way of making yogurt. 

The mechanics of the inner workings of yogurt, which I can go to in much more detail, are ripe for analogy to the ways that human systems form, de-form, transform, and re-form. Bookmark “resilience in networks,” and “transformation” as topics of interest, and yogurt as a lens through which to look at these topics. 

Also bookmark “experience design” as a practice of interest, and the cultivation of spoiled milk into a repeatably delicious product as something that we can analyze as an act of intentional design, and extend into other food and non-food design processes.

As I mentioned above, yogurts are created from previous yogurts. They don’t have to be done this way, but in common practice, they are. In that sense, yogurts are recursive. A piece of the whole begets the next whole; the “next” is dependent on the “previous.” In Indian households it is very common to make yogurt at home, and yogurt starters are often an important item to bring along when moving from one place to another, or to share with family and friends when they come to a new place. We can trace lineage through yogurt — where did it come from, where did it branch, how did it transform? We can tell stories of migration, of immigration, through yogurt; both through people and through bacteria. 

There are a few ways we could go about tracing the lineage of yogurt. One of those ways would take advantage of recent dramatic improvements in our collective ability to understand the biological makeup of the world around us. Genome sequencing has become orders of magnitude cheaper, with handheld DNA sequencing tools now available to hobbyists, with room for further improvements in hardware and cost well within reach. The study of genomics coupled with the techniques of bioinformatics, among other related fields, are giving us new information about both the “hardware” and “software” of life, and allowing us to identify specific species of invisible microorganisms in our environment. We even have the ability to “program” some genes. We’ve figured out ways to store information in DNA, and we’re beginning to understand the possibilities of using DNA instead of bits as the basis for computing. Taken together, we are starting to learn techniques that may give us new infrastructure-level tools to reimagine the ways in which we build the materials around us — both physical and digital. The uses of these technologies will not be neutral; we have to imagine and execute the uses of the technologies that we want to see exist. 

It’s possible that yogurt already is a kind of archive in itself; I would like to explore whether we can use the bacterial makeup of yogurt as a way of identifying its ancestors in ways that are roughly similar to how we are able to identify our relatives using DNA. I’d also like to explore using DNA storage to embed oral histories of the Indian community in New York — my mom’s family was part of the early batch of Indian immigrants to arrive in Queens in the 70s — in the DNA of lactobacillus, and use that lactobacillus to make yogurt. I’d then want to demonstrate the ability to read out those files from the yogurt DNA.

Zooming out — I am trying to weave together a variety of interests and questions through an exploration of yogurt. It is possible that I’ll narrow in on one specific area: resilience in networks, transformation, lineage, stories of the Indian-American community’s roots, the future of biology and computing, infrastructure technology versus end uses, Vedic philosophy. It’s also possible that all of these can be refracted through one prism. Let the journey begin…