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Team:Weimar-Heidelberg Arts
From 2010.igem.org
Project Abstract
Super Cell is a project developed for the iGEM competition 2010 in collaboration with the iGEM Team Heidelberg. Super Cell is a fictional online supermarket offering speculative products, which are all based on Synthetic Biology. By putting already existing and far-out future applications next to each other in a webshop. The projects aims to improve public awareness about Synthetic Biology and at the same time, foster a debate on how we want to see it manifested in our everyday lives. Implications of Biotechnologies are usually discussed on a philosophical, ethical, legal or maybe religious level. All of these areas share a pretty abstract perspective on the matter. By designing speculative products and presenting them in a familiar environment such as a webshop, we aim to create tangible manifestations which will allow specialists and non-specialists to engage in a discussion about desired and undesired implications of Synthetic Biology. If we, as a society, want to influence how this powerful science will affect our future lives, this kind of discussion is essential to have now.
Synthetic Biology Supermarket
Super Cell is presented as a supermarket website, offering a range of products which are all designed by members of the iGEM team. Super Cell is the first store solely for Synthetic Biology based products and is about to open up a number of stores throughout Europe and the US. The Super Cell website already gives us a glimpse of the products that will be coming to your local Super Cell store in the near future. Each product is presented using one or more picture, a product description, and a technical description that is contributed from the scientific part of the project by the Heidelberg part of the team, giving insights into the actual technical feasibility. The project is interested in possible implications of Synthetic Biology in our near future, therefor the website employs video and text comments. These are partly provided by the team itself as a means to think about everyday consequences and to enrich the narrative aspect of the products. Of course the commenting function is also available to visitors on our website to express their imagined interactions with our products.
The collaboration
The Project is a collaboration between students of Gestaltung medialer Umgebungen at the Bauhaus-University in Weimar and students of Molecular Biotechnology, Biology, Philosophy and Psychology of Ruprecht-Karls-University in Heidelberg. The collaboration started off with a Lab introduction for the Weimar students at the BioQuant Institute in Heidelberg, and a subsequent three-day retreat to get to know each others backgrounds and perspectives. This kick-off was followed by mutual visits, emailing, and regular Skype conferences.
