The Cosmonaut

I would say that Agustin Jiménez’s was the best talk we had at our recent “Desconferencia” (a gathering of professionals where everybody gives a small presentation).

He enlightened us on the convergence point between interaction design and biotechnology. The main point was that biological systems are being created with more and more levels of abstraction and that one day in the near future designers will be needed to determine how these systems will be used by people. The fact that DNA sequences and machine code have a very similar structure (I am simplifying here, I know) leads to the building of new levels of abstraction just as we did on machine code, making it possible to design biosystems that have sensory interfaces a person could interact with:

Have you ever think about a cell as a machine?. They really behave like it whether they are yeast or pluripotent cells in your bone marrow. In fact, as Drew Endy define them, they act as computational systems. They receive inputs, and behave accordingly as outputs. Cells have measurements tools, priorities to satisfy and self awareness of different kinds.

As interaction designers we can apply all the inherited knowledge in our discipline to new horizons like biotech. It’s just a new framework with new variables.

Agustín Jiménez is an interaction designer who always has one foot at the side of technology and another one on the biomedical edge. His post on the talk: Biotechnology and Interaction Design is worth a relaxed reading.