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Think Silicon Valley Design Is All About Apple And Facebook? Get Ready For Designer Biohacking

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Late last year, a Bay Area startup brought a green fluorescent beer to market. The brewing technology was relatively conventional. A protein found in jellyfish was engineered into the yeast. What made the product unconventional is that customers had to do the genetic engineering themselves.

Kits to make green fluorescent beer – which can also be used to modify yeasts for champagne and mead – are the latest offering of The Odin, a company dedicated to "consumer genetic design". And if these fledgling applications of DIY biology seem trivial, the underlying ambition is to create nothing less than the genetic equivalent of desktop publishing: to provide "tools that allow anyone to make unique and usable organisms at home".

The ODIN

So it's apt that one of The Odin's biohacking kits is on view at London's Design Museum as part of an ambitious new exhibit that seeks to define what makes California design distinctively Californian. The show includes iconic items ranging from the Whole Earth Catalog to the Apple Macintosh to the Facebook Like icon. All of these are intended to exemplify aspects of freedom, which is what Design Museum curator Justin McGuirk contends is the essence of products designed in California. "California's emphasis on design for personal liberation is not about offering liberation from something but the liberation to do something or be something," he argues in his introduction to an accompanying book. "It is about putting tools in your hands, so you can go where you want, say what you want, make what you want, see what you want and join who you want."

This mentality evolved primarily from the counterculture, for which the Whole Earth Catalog was a kind of bible. (In addition to publishing articles about DIY projects, it provided mailing addresses for ordering everything from gardening gear to computer books.) Access to Tools was the catalog's tagline ­– and could equally be deemed the battle cry of the '60s generation.

The implications of designing freedom are more complicated, and the Design Museum's Silicon Valley boosterism does little to resolve them. The Mac facilitated the desktop publishing revolution (and much more). Facebook has transformed all media into social media, to be freely reformulated by each consumer. We have tools in unprecedented abundance, with unprecedented power. We can go where we want, say what we want, make what we want, see what we want and join who we want as never before. As a result, our lives are better in some ways (including greater opportunity to express our ideas) and worse in others (such as the near paralysis of democratic decision-making by fake and fake fake news). For all the virtues of California design, there is scant evidence that these freedoms have improved our society as a whole.

We have reached this stage, and not gone further, because design too often provides access without offering guidance. Or the guidance given by designers is merely a demonstration of what the tool can achieve, a proof of concept as pointless as green fluorescent beer. While it would be a mistake for design to regress to an earlier stage where the designer was the authority and the public was just a consumer, it does not follow that design must therefore be completely noncommittal.

Good design not only affords degrees of freedom, but also evokes a sense of purpose. Great design inspires greatness. That requires more than engineering. It may even need outside intervention, as happened in the early years of desktop publishing, when computers were leveraged by artists like Zuzana Licko and David Carson.

Facebook and The Odin deserve as much. Access deserves excellence.

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