Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg: Scatalog

Daisy and fellow designer James King collaborated with the Cambridge team that produced the Grand Prize winning entry, out of 1700 participants and 112 teams, which we think is a real testament to what happens when you bring intelligent designers in on projects right from the outset. Daisy and James  worked alongside the students in the lab over the summer, and encouraged them, as she put it to “think outside the petri dish”.

E.Chromi in the lab - Mike Davies

Their proposals for the resulting project – E.Chromi: a pigment-producing variant of the E.Coli bacteria developed in the Cambridge labs – was certainly eye catching. Daisy and James rocked up to MIT with a secure briefcase containing a selection of lightly polychrome turds, with each colour variant created by the bacteria designed to highlight the presence of a particular disease in the delivering body. Rather like bacterial disclosing tablets, this futuristic diagnostic tool is proposed as an inexpensive way of monitoring your own health, and checking up on the presence of diseases to which you might already know you have a genetic susceptibility.

The Scatalog Suitcase - James King

The Scatalog was one of seven separate futuristic proposals that Daisy and James presented to the Cambridge team, all of which were intended to help the scientists thing of the real-world applications and impact of their creations (good and bad), and how the results of their research might one day be translated into commercial products. The designers also helped the students understand the importance of being able to communicate what they were doing effectively to the outside world, by encouraging them to think about how their work fitted into developments taking place beyond the laboratory.

Yesterday's lunch box - James King

In the print edition that is. On The Blog, anything goes, anything…

Here are some gems from our Nano Issue

Papa Dax (from the “Itsy Bitsy Rider” article)

We interviewed Papa Dax, a Honda Dax fanatic who also happens to be president of Antwerp’s Dax Association. The article being about motorbikes, we thought it slightly weird to publish a picture of him sitting on a counch. But we still love the picture, so here you have it.

Antwerp's illustrious Papa Dax (photography Sarah Eechaut)

Nanocyl’s Big Bags (from the “One for the nation” article)

The world of scientific research is extremely competitive, and consequently secretive. Photographer Sarah Michielsen and myself got a first-hand taste of this when visiting Nanocyl‘s facilities in Sambreville, Belgium. After being allowed to photograph everything except the company’s reactor, we left the company compound feeling pretty smug, having captured as much as we had wanted to. The only request from the company was that we’d show them the feature before going to print. We obliged, then all hell broke loose. “Could you use this word instead of that word?”, “Could you not say this?” and “Could you use our pictures instead of yours?”. Like we suddenly became the company’s pet little copywriter overnight. Truly shocking.

We’d love to show you the email exchanges (with a HR executive, nothing less! You’d think a company so intent on curtailing the freedom of press would have its own PR officer), but that could get us in quite a legal pickle. Next best option is to show you the picture they didn’t want us to publish – not because they were sensitive. No, because some suit simply didn’t like them.

Nanocyl's Big bags - 50kg bags used to ship their Carbon Nanotubes in (photography Sarah Michielsen)