Team:Weimar-Heidelberg Arts

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Project Abstract

Super Cell is a project being 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 in the future applications next to each other in the 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 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 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 for solely Synthetic Biology based products and is about to open up a bigger number of stores throughout Europe and the US. The Super Cell website already gives us a glimpse of the products that will be available in the local stores in the near future. Each Product is presented using one or more pictures, a product description and a technical description which is s contributed by the scientific part of the project from Heidelberg giving insights into the actual technical feasibility. As the project is interested in possible implications of Synthetic Biology, 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 still available to visitors of the 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 to 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.