Context: The Synthetic Biology Australasia (SBA) society represents a broad community of people working in or close to synthetic biology (synbio). In recent years, members of the society have established cityspecific nodes for local meetups and events. On 9 October 2020, the Perth node held an event at which Professor Robert Sparrow (Monash University) gave a talk entitled, “How design makes a difference: Ethics, power and the nature/ culture divide.” The words here represent a snippet from Rob’s talk; words which resonated with our multidisciplinary team and help justify the value of synbio-design collaborations like ours here. Interestingly, although Rob never uses the word ‘scientist’ explicitly, his talk was directed toward a scientific audience. His use of the word ‘designer’ is intended to include both scientists and designers, revealing the ways these two communities—who are so different in their practices and disciplinary conventions—are in fact intricately connected.
Are designers and scientists more similar than we realise?
When you are dealing with the artificial, or the cultural, or the engineered, you are dealing with human agency… and you are dealing with the power of other people. Things that are designed have designers. Here are three ways that the introduction of a designer into our environment matters: 1. The exercise of power: things that used to be natural—and didn’t reflect the agency of other people—were constraints on our will. For example, we might struggle against nature or rail against it, but it didn’t represent the power of someone else over us. When something becomes engineered, we are confronted with the possibility that there is an exercise of power. 2. Questions of responsibility: someone becomes responsible for the artificial, the cultural, the engineered, but they are not responsible for the natural... What used to be natural disasters are now clearly political and cultural disasters. We are becoming more and more responsible for what used to be deemed “acts of God”. 3. Blame: when we introduce design, we introduce questions of power, responsibility, and blame.
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