Playing LEGO with DNA

It is based on an article at :http://tehelka.com/playing-lego-with-dna/
My current project on presence management is heavily dependent on sensors. It is based on the premise that in future technology would already be embedded in our environment. Our system will basically integrate the data and analyze them to help derive meaningful insights about our family.

This article highlights a remarkable discovery by Krishnan from Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru. Her team has tried to embed cargo in the DNA nanostructures to investigate biological processes.

Extract:

DNA rods can be joined together at junctions to create two-dimensional matrices, and these, in turn, can be piled up to form elaborate scaffolds. The objects created can be rigid, “like baskets”, or dynamic like “scissors, whose flexibility gives it function.”

Schematic of an icosahedron made from DNA containing nanoscale cargo within its internal void

Krishnan’s next project was more ambitious. Using DNA junctions that had five open ends, she created an icosahedron, a solid shaped a bit like a ball, except with 20 triangular faces instead of a smooth curve. It took a week of reactions in the laboratory to do this.

A natural, fluorescent polymer (also an indicator of acidity) was encapsulated within the DNA icosahedron. The compound was once again injected into a worm, and in a repeat of the previous success, it went straight to the very same cells. Except that the implications this time around were far greater.

While the entire research is now shifted to ubiquitous computing, it would be interesting to see how synthetic biology can help shift our perceptions of the way we function and how we could design objects.

People to meet in the next 10yrs

So as I have started to read the books on interaction design, I realized that not just the field is new with little theory to back it, but also the people who have contributed are few. So I am making a list of people whom I wish to meet someday:
M P Ranjan
Donald Norman
Jon Kolko
Hartmut Esslinger
Erik stolterman
Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby
Christopher Alexander

Bill Buxton

Ezio Manzini
John Thackara

The list is not exhaustive, and as i read more I hope to add more people to this list.

The first person I have met so far is M P Ranjan. He happened to do a workshop with the Transcultural Design students on design thinking.

I think the biggest challenge for an interaction designer lies in the fact that it is not one but a combinition of many. 

From: blog.ux-india.org

Transversing multiple domains is not possible here. So the answer lies in working with multiple skill-set of people. But the difficulty lies in contextualising the problems and translating among the diverse set of designers/collaborators in an effective manner.

Design thinking workshop with M P Ranjan

This was a three day seminar held at the Transcultural Design Centre, Srishti

Following are my notes:

• General to the ultimate particular

Erik stolterman explains this as: “The outcome of a specific design process…is an ultimate particular. It is something unique. It is not the universal car, the universal organizational structure, or curriculum. We are creating a particular, which, when taken together with other particulars, makes up the whole of our experienced reality."

  "Distinctions between what is true (e.g., universal or general) and what is real (e.g., particular, full particular and ultimate particular) can be made in the following ways. A painting by Cézanne is real; the atomic weight of copper is true. An experience is real; a scientific observation is true. An organization is real; a proven fact is true. An individual’s perspective is real; a predictable event is true."

Though I am yet to fully grasp the concept. But this is what I understood so far: designs are the outcome of a problems/ opportunities. They are created in a certain context so even we have an answer to a problem, it is not the same when applied onto a different situation. So certain things are fixed. The way we may approach a problem, our reference points yet when applied to a specific situation, it takes its own form.

[Referred from the Nature of Design Practice and Implications for Interaction Design Research by Erik Stolterman, http://transground.blogspot.in/2009_09_01_archive.html]

[Link: http://www.ijdesign.org/ojs/index.php/IJDesign/article/view/240/148]

• Something could be graphical to something very design centric
•  Fuzzy front end of design
• Skeleton versus rich picture

When we solve a problem, the first step includes making a map of the product, service etc from beginning to end. The point Ranjan made here is that instead of limiting ourselves to just the basic wireframe of the product, service etc. cycle, he suggested why not keep the complexity is alive.

His point was that often we ignore or miss out on vital opportunities due to extreme refinement of the thought process in the initial iteration process.

• Understand the scope of a project by mapping the nodes, lines from one service or object to another. Each node could represent one area of opportunity.

This adds on to the point above. only when we have a near exhaustive maps can we see the opportunity points. As the product/services move from one point to another, it will encounter different problems. For example if we have to deliver pizza from a shop to a house, would mean something as common as bribing the  police to operate smoothly to learning what happens to the trashed can. In short, something as common as the bribing in India doesn't need a special research but happens as we spend time with the community.

• While designing, talk about the alternative: It gives the option to negotiate in different situations

Another point that can be applied to any creative practice. Always have options, even we choose to go with one. So not just we can show our work and explain better why a certain idea is much more worthwhile to pursue. It also works a repertory in case the situation changes.

• Importance of fuzzy drawings help us in understanding the quality of a space but it may not have a name (Christopher Alexander)

I loved the way Christopher explains the essence of experience. So during his thesis, he came to India and spent few months to study the evolution of the patterns of the civilization that lived near the Ganges basin. While explaining the same, he concluded that experience is not something that can be explained through strict lines. Each place has its own essence so even if the patterns are same, the essence will vary. So having a very graphically structured drawing will show only half the truth. Fuzzy drawings are good. It does what a perfect rendering would fail to achieve.

• ‘Design thinking is about talking plus doing’

There needs to be a balance between the two of it. Talking can help in explaining why a certain member  of the team chooses a specific post-it to being able to crit within a team.

It is as much important that we do (write, prototype etc.) what is in our mind and not talk about it solely.

• ‘Thinking about how we behave is essential to understanding how a group works.’

This works especially when there is  a team. Our reactions, the way we negotiate for our ideas, understanding how each one of us behaves when a certain idea is dropped can give us cues to what, when and how each member behaves and believes. Having a good team is as much important to a design process as is having a good output.

• ‘Learn how to do it. Not reading design methods. We don’t need knowledge, but insights.’

This is what Ranjan told me, when asked how do we know if the certain process is worth any effort at all. I told him how in the other course we were following a very strict guideline on how to come about a solution. But what happens when the situation changes, can a process which is so effective in one be effective in another situation?

•  Reference: 101 design methods, Service design tools.org, Designing design by Jogn Chris Jones
• Basic classification of design process by Ranjan:

Intuitive

Categorize

Analytical

Explorative

Abduction: Fusing of two design ideas to create new alternatives

Synthetic

Reflective

Experience from the Bangalore Service jam

This is the second time I was participating in an event outside college. The first was the IAMAI hackathon.
It is a good change to meet and work with people from new territory.It helps to go outside college and learn something new and try applying it in real world scenarios.
I attended the Bangalore Service Jam last weekend. It s a global service design jam started by two designers-Adam and Markus, and this year Bangalore was the headquarters. So both the founding member were present here.

The basic concept of this is that you work as a team; join a team where you do not know anyone; and each team should have members from different backgrounds.

I was in this team of 7 member. That's a lot. And our challenge for this year was 'Grow'. My initial reaction was apprehension on learning that I have to be part of a team where I don't know anybody, forget about remembering anyone's name, I was not even sure how we could work together.

So here I was sitting with a interface designer, a marketing guy, developer, graphic designer, coder etc. As the day began, the marketing guy took lead and started discussing strategies, it made the interface designer unhappy. She could not communicate her ideas. making it worse was the fact three members of the team got disinterested early, so they started to roam around. And before you know it, our team was no longer working. I felt bad. I just wanted to enjoy designing and looking at the team condition, I decided to take lead, get the marketing guy to hold back for a while and make the disinterested members do something.

So next day, I come early and divide the work. Also I started facilitating the conversations. It was the first time I was taking lead, so I was nervous and pretty stressed out. but somehow I wanted to at least create a finish the challenge.

My job now turned from a designer to a facilitator and collaborator. I was running around, talking and making people work. Towards the end of it we managed to finish the brief the idea to the judge. Except that I chose the marketing guy to present as I felt that he is a good speaker. and before you know it, he deviates from the main concept and starts throwing his own idea to the judge. It pisses me off badly and few more members, but I decided to stay tight-lipped as cross countering our team member would throw a negative image in front of the judge.

This two day event exposed me to a bigger challenge. How do you communicate your ideas effectively?
It is not enough to just know design process. When someone works in a multi-disciplinary team with a brief to solve, you need to get the idea going. Designing is just one part of it. It also brought about the importance of rehearsing and rechecking with each team member to ensure that their role is clear and work is in the right direction.

Effective communication and team mentoring are crucial parts to the success of a design process.

Ticket to talk-How do we start a conversation

I recently came across few interesting researches on presence and ambiguity in the digital
technology for social interaction. I thought I will share them with you.

So this one is called Ticket to Talk Television. It is help me build on my thinking on the reciprocal awareness concept that the S.Lab project is on.
There are two of them. I will start with the first one. It's called Ticket to Talk. Well, the idea is how do you create a conversation starter among senior citizens. So this research is very similar to our project. It tackles similar challenges. Senior citizen may be physically dependent on medical aids and at times on other people, but what is remarkable is the tendency to help themselves. Psychologically it has been discovered that there is hesitation among the senior citizens to ask for help: partly because they do want to disrupt someone's live and party because it makes them feel incapable.
"The issue seemed to be not only that people are living alone and in some cases are feeling lonely,but that loneliness is something people do not explicitly talk about and something they do not want to be associated with because it is experienced as a particular social identity or individual character/attribute that singles out him/her as negatively different in relation to others in the community."
This particular project uses a television in a medium to channel communication. It has the option of seeing who is watching television and you can directly use your phone to replace your remote. Once you know who is watching you can start with mundane conversations of what you were watching.

It speculates that the display of community TV activity may provide you with a sense of other people’s
presence reminding you that you are part of a community.

What is new about this research is the thought process that television is more than a pervasive media. It can actively also help build network of shared emotions and thoughts with fellow people with whom you already have common links.
The important part is that this as an indirect method of interaction. It doesn't give the contents to speak on but helps you build one.
An excerpt explaining the context:

"Even though senior housing communities are not much different to other social establishments, it revealed itself to us as a fascinating arena for understanding how people manage social engagements. The people living there were a diverse group with different backgrounds and interests who are in a stage of life that in no way can be characterized as a well defined final state only defined by age. Some of those who have moved into these living facilities are maybe still working, some getting ready to retire and some already retired, some living alone and some living with a partner. This element of diversity combined with the ongoing process of aging appeared to us as an additional social attribute that people are experiencing and dealing with on an everyday basis in interaction with others."

The second one is based on embracing the ambiguity in the design of digital technology for social interaction among senior citizens.

Harvey Sacks writes about the ways in which the dog – when walking the dog in the park – is a ‘ticket’ to start having a conversation with people who they are previously unacquainted without it being treated as an unwelcome advance.
Opening a conversation as much important to continue one. The use of digital technology is exactly trying to achieve that while in are in your comfort zone. You don't really have to take the dog for a walk anymore. The technology will instead give you the opportunities based on shared knowledge to begin a conversation that can ultimately help you build  a more intimate understanding of each other.

As we move towards design we identify three themes:
1. ‘Allowing room for ambiguity by leaving things unsaid’.
2. ‘Utilizing existing everyday activities when looking for enablers of social interaction’.
3. ‘The integration of digital technology with other resources for human action’.

On a similar line of thought we came across this idea where messaging can be open ended. So there needs to be the option of sending a blank message to something as open as What____? or So, __________.