Illumina launches own website and MyGenome iPhone application

How similar is my genome to Bill Gates.. what a scary thought.

At the recent Consumer Genetics Show, Illumina, a genomics technology provider of second-generation sequencing instruments (the Genome Analyzer II),  is launching a personal genome sequencing service via a new website; everygenome.com. The website discusses the processes of genotyping and DNA sequencing for individuals, doctors and scientists and will offer its service for $48,000 on its Genome Analyzer II platform.  It will conduct the sequencing at its laboratory  providing customers with a list of SNPs (single-nucleotide polymorphism) and structural variations in their genomes.

Knome was first to offer whole-genome sequencing to individuals  including data interpretation, since early 2008 and currently charges $99,500 and Medomics offers a “diagnostic genome” service at an undisclosed price, although it has not yet had a customer for it. Illumina is the first sequencing-technology provider to open its service business to individual customers for non-research purposes and to consier how interpretaiton and comparison of ones genome could exist on the Iphone.

However Illumina does not provide interpretation services. The analysis and evaluation is where the spin begins, the disease- risk assessments, ancestry analyses and information about inherited traits.  It has instead  partnered with direct-to-consumer interpretative services offered by  23andMe, Navigenics, Decode Genetics, and Knome. Customers can select from these partners to receive interpretative packages of their data for an additional fee.

As it will only be a few years until the technolgies that are being invested in will enable the the sequencing of our genomes to be cheap enough to buy in Boots, very cheap sequencing will rapidly result in a depletion of the sequence generation market as people will only need to get their genome sequenced once to have all the data they need in the world. So it is here that interpretation of this data that will be the “gift that keeps on giving…as new research uncovers more details about the functional portions of the genome and their interactions with environmental risk factors customers will always need their reports updated and re-analysed in increasingly more sophisticated ways.” This analysis will be a constantly evolving self knowledge portal that can be tapped into as and when for the individual – creating a consistent re-reading of data. (via GenomicFutures)

The FATE institute recognize that this ability to learn more and moe about ones genetic makeup and future health can consistently be updated and soon it wil be like reading your own horoscope in the Metro paper. The more and more we learn about ourselves the more we will only listen to what we want to hear, a DNA sequence interpretation will become very much like a coldreading, a form of mentalism wheer you listen out for what you want to hear. And in doing so it may or maynot motivate you to change the way you live.

The FATE Institute believes that the more personal genome sequencing companies choose to invest in interpretations of SNP data as well as the technology the easier it will be for individuals to be able to choose how and by whom they want their future to be interpreted.

Those start-ups and corporations who interpret their future each have their own motivations, branding and perspectives that taint the outcomes.They currently offer interpretative services that offer individuals a subscription to a fountain of their own self-knowledge that will continue to provide analysis about their own future lives indefinitely.

However how will this change as the technology develops further and becomes accessible to all?

What will be the impacts of an open source democratic approach to personal genome sequencing?

How will this technology be harnessed if it leaves the large private sector laboratories and enters individuals homes and makeshift laboratories similar to those that are occurring in response to the synbiobrick era?

Will citizen geneticists be able to sequence their genome and interpret the data in their own home, patent it using Science Commons licenses and sell their services on ebay or Amazon?

What similarities and differences can we see between this possible future  and the open source approach in the software industry and the abilities for the web 2.0 to provide platforms for amateur activists and social entrepreneurs that exists outside of traditional corporations, start ups or  top down state structures?

Thrilling Wonder Stories symposium at the AA

Two weeks ago i attended a one day symposium entitled ‘Thrilling Wonder Stories: Speculative futures for an alternate present’
This was an event hosted at the Architectural Association and co-ordinated by Liam Young, architect practitioner and tutor at the AA amd Geoff Manaugh who writes the well written blog, BLDGBLOG about architecture, fiction and speculative storytelling. Geoff introduced the event by discussing his interests in how buildings can become part of a narrative for future plots or events or settings just by going that extra couple of steps into speculative storytelling and how framin wht a building might this could be demonstrated through writing ficition, sci fi, literature, poetry what a building might do or the event the building might frame.

The symposium was a 6-hour event with a line-up of practitioners from various genres including gaming, film, comics, animation, literature and art each discussing the thematic, imaginative, technical, and even structural connections between speculative storytelling, futures and architectural design.They each discussed storytelling and the use of their medium to imagine and describe their own alternative ways of telling stories about possible futures of wondrous possibilities or dark cautionary tales.

Speakers included:

—Sir Peter Cook, cofounder of Archigram and CRABstudio, and designer (with HOK) of the 2012 London Olympic Stadium

—Warren Ellis, comic book author and graphic novelist who uses the creation of stories in his comics for sociocultural commentary covering topics and transhumanist themes such as nanotechnology, cryonics, uploading, and human enhancement.– with a portfolio ranging from X-Men and Iron Man to Ellis’s legendary Transmetropolitan, FreakAngels, and Fell.

—Architects Francois Roche and Stephanie Lavaux of R&Sie, designers of, among other things, the awesome Spidernethewood house

—Novelist Ian MacLeod, winner of the 2009 Arthur C. Clarke Award and author of The Light Ages and The House of Storms

—Journalist and games critic Jim Rossignol, author of This Gaming Life: Travels in Three Cities

—Viktor Antonov, art director for Half-Life 2 and production designer for Christian Volckman’s film Renaissance

—Squint/Opera, independent media studio and producers of last year’s widely publicized Flooded London

—Nic Clear, director of Unit 15 at the Bartlett School of Architecture.

Those who I found to be quite insane and fantastical were the architects R&Sie who discussed their approach
to creating architectural stories based on investigations into new biopolymers, time restrictions, temporary structures becoming permanent, buildings as parasites, self-sufficient pacyderm powered structures etc

SquintOpera make visually delicious 3d renderings to tell pure eyecandy fuelled stories. One piece of work they briefly showed were their visual speculations of how London might look if it were flooded. They told us how to make the world in 6 steps:

One practitioner in particular who struck a chord with me was Ian Mcloud. A science fiction writer who has written a variety of novels, none of which i unfortunatly have not read, discussed his opinions on the difficulties of writing about the future in a time where the idea of the future has become saturated and people no longer buy into the myth of progress and optimistic change generated by European and American ideals since the 30s.

What interested me the most about his talk were the outcomes from various scifi writing workshops he has conducted with children. He found the children needed very little prompting when asking them to imagine how their world might become as the grow older.When writing their stories they were not full of tales of monorails, takin food pills and jetpacs but he noticed that the modern child will write dark, catastrophic tales that describe more of a continuation of now, a variety of ways of looking sideways rather than a progressive forward looking vision. Mcloud suggested this maybe the result of young people being surrounded by the news of the future that was not the same for news of the future when Mcloud was in the 60s. Everyone bought into the western dream of progress even though at the same time there were realities of cruelty of Atomic bombs, Auschwitz and carpet bombing.

How do young people address the issues of imagining what is going to happen in their lives?

Excerpts from Ian’s talk of various childrens own speculative storytelling…

“The room stank of last nights pasteurized steak and chips with a hint of that disgusting grass-seed juice. I’m just so glad thy I don’t have to put that down my throat …I’m lucky I don’t have a throat.”

“Nowadays noone speaks to each other in the community, you don’t even know your next door neighbours name. Noone walks anymore they either drive or fly. This may sound exciting but it means traffic is on more than one level. …Cars just get programmed to take you from A to B. But it can be hard to understand the technology thses especilly for old fogeys like me…”

He also had 8 points to make about what the world has in store:

1 the future won’t be dominated by western culture
2 people won’t be people
3 space travel won’t happen
4 science is becoming increasingly incomprehensible – we can’t understand the world
5 real aliens if they did exist would barely be comprehensible to us and they would be here already
6 we are as incomprehensible to the past just as the future is incomprehensible to us
7 language and communication is going to be completely different as to it is know
8 we are all going to be dead

Haynes Manuals go Galactic

This Haynes manual looks at the evolution and design of the mighty Saturn V rocket, the Command and Service Modules, and the Lunar Module. It describes the space suits worn by the crew and their special life support and communications systems. We learn about how the Apollo 11 mission was flown – from launch procedures to ‘flying’ the Saturn V and the ‘LEM’, and from moon walking to the earth re-entry procedure.

What other exploded drawings could be put into a manual? Could the products of FATE be a manual to download and distribute via science commons?

Motorola creates future mythologies

‘Motorola 2033′ is a recent brand visioning from 31 Motorola designers around the world who were all asked to envision the future of telecomms in 25 years time as a celebration of 25 years of the mobile phone.

Yes it is great that Motorola is putting there thoughts out there with fantastic visual delights and as stated by Motorola this is about expressing their ‘design mythology’ a way to express their brand. But are they telling us any interesting stories? Where is the real mythology ie. no actual speculative scenarios or storytelling. Or reference to potential implications of biotechnologies on our everyday understanding of how we will go about our lives.

But it does create a buzz for Motorola which they obviously desperately need seeing as their current phones have not competed well. A good start but bring on the complexity of synthetic biology and how communicating with people may just be about sharing personal genomics…could engaging “blue sky” thinking be about creating discussion to then lead to inspire the future of Motorola’s brand? Perhaps they need some external participants; some sort of co-critical open design platform?…

Love Land: Adult theme park gets Chinese talking about sex

source: Chinaren

Source: Telegraph

BEIJING (Reuters Life!) – China’s is building its first sexually explicit theme park, and the giant genitalia sculptures and suggestive exhibits are getting many people hot and bothered in a country where talking about sex is still taboo.

Love Land is set to open in October in the southwestern metropolis of Chongqing and will feature exhibitions about sexual history and how to use condoms properly. It will also host sex technique workshops, the China Daily newspaper said.

other links:

Times online: Lets buy a sex theme park

Source: Jeju Loveland in Korea

social and open innovation

• Jeff Jarvis on the transpatent corporation | Media | The Guardian
  We are seeing the first glimmers of the transparent corporation, where the customer finally has a seat at the table when decisions are being made. The internet makes this possible. Starbucks, Dell and Salesforce.com have opened public forums for customer ideas, all using software from Salesforce. Customers submit their ideas, then fellow-customers vote on them – some gain a following, others die on the vine – and the companies implement the best of them. Salesforce chief executive officer Marc Benioff says: “The dead-end suggestion box and the auto-reply are symbols of corporate indifference and are no longer tolerated.” This process happens in the open, for all to see. Blogger Doc Searls, a Harvard fellow, has coined a term for this turnaround: vendor relationship management (versus the old customer relationship management).
• Social Innovation Lab for Kent
  Kent County Council (KCC) is well known for placing the citizens of Kent at the heart of all it does. From the Gateways to Telehealth, from Kent TV to the Kent Card, there are many examples of the ways in which the council has worked hard to build its services around people.

RCA Bleak Futures?

• FT.com / Arts / Visual Arts – A tough climate for art school graduates
  Sir Christopher Frayling, the RCA’s rector, remains upbeat. Looking out from his office window towards Kensington Gardens, he said: “You’ve got to believe in the future, otherwise you wouldn’t get up in the morning. In recessional times the arts become particularly important, and there’s a new seriousness in design. We don’t want to produce gaudy baubles for rich collectors.”

  Plenty of students seem preoccupied with such bleak, end-of-the-world images. And Rebecca Parkin has produced a painting where an unshaven man, battered and bedraggled, crawls wild-eyed from a turbulent sea. I guess that the world beyond his island seems in danger of imminent, apocalyptic destruction.

Design Provocations: new perspectives on design

On Tuesday night I was kindly invited to an event organized by Ludic Group as part of their Creative Capital series of events hosted by the Hospital Club.

Entitled “DESIGN PROVOCATIONS: DEBATING DESIGN & DESIGN FOR DEBATE” the evening was a great opportunity to bring together those who design alternative futures to discuss the implications of emerging technologies in our lives. Obviously this is a topic close to my heart being as I am a graduate of the Design Interactions course at the RCA. I will always be someone who is investigating the bigger picture and the wider impact of this approach; applying the skills of the designer with art, science and technology as a way to discuss the continuation of now, the preferable, the probable, the potential.
The one thing I have felt since graduating is that there is no opportunity to actually discuss and debate what it is that we are doing, there is no obvious path for this way of working yet there has always been a way for people to express their ideas of speculative futures by telling stories.
Not that I feel that there is only one way to be a designer, but there could be a 3rd way, a pluralistic approach that applies design as a tool to highlight the importance of the complexity of humanity and the normative social and political systems we live in that we fit into or try to mashup or destroy.

Speakers included James King, Anab Jain, James Auger, Jack Mama, Dr.Marcos Cruz, and each were depicting their own way whether using objects, film, animation, architecture photography or ethnofictions to deal with the possibilities the impact of new and emerging technologies will and do have on our everyday lives and enforce us to reinterpret our social and political structures.

As quoted by Paola Antonelli design is evolving in response to the hugely complex changes in the world ..“Is the recent dialogue between designers and other disciplines mutating design and therefore mutating our world?”…and in doing so the audience and the facilitators to this approach in design is also changing.

Is this kind of design and futures thinking futile? Who should it be addressing, where can this way of working be most affective? Is it design to facilitate? How will it change public engagement and our individual understanding of how our futures could go? Does anyone care about the future or should we stick to designing new FMCG and ways to solve current misunderstandings of our world from a ’social’ design perspective and deal with the now?

Anyway, just some thoughts…

Scientology goes to court for fraudulent persuasion techniques

• BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Scientology trial due in France

  The Church of Scientology is set to go on trial in France, accused of organised fraud.The case centres on a complaint by a woman who says she was pressured into paying large sums of money after being offered a free personality test.
  The woman at the centre of the case says she was approached by church members in Paris and offered a free personality test, but she ended up spending all her savings on books, medicines and the electronic metre that is part of the paraphernalia of Scientology.

• Church of Scientology faces fraud trial in France | World news | The Guardian
The latest case centres on a complaint made in 1998 by a 33-year-old woman who said she was approached by a group of people outside a Paris metro station who offered her a free personality test and a later meeting to interpret the results. Over the following months, she said she paid 140,000 francs (£17,000) to the Scientologists for courses, books, medication, and “purification packs”.

The old FATE machines at Carters Steam Fair