Biodesign Academy
An open lecture for the Biodesign course at Aalto University, on how AI is changing the way designers work with living matter.
Barbara Pollini asks her students a question. Before asking what an organism could become in the lab, ask what it is already doing here, in the forest. Why, and with whom?
The talk carried that question down a ladder. From the forest, to a fungus on a birch, to a petri dish, to the threads it is made of, to one protein, and finally to a line of letters. That last rung is where synthetic biology works, and where AI works with proteins.
AI can now show you a protein’s shape in moments. What it cannot show you is where that protein came from, who it works with, or what a change to it would touch. Putting the protein back into its place is the part no tool can do for you.
Judgement. What does the output show, what can it not show, and where is the model least sure? What was measured, and what was only predicted?
Fluency. Could you run it again, alone, on a protein from your own dish?
Care. Who and what would a change touch, from the forest floor to the end of its life? And what goes back?
The card is two pages of A4, made to be printed and written on. Free, and no email needed.
Shapes that were measured in a laboratory, with the people and the place behind each one.
Shapes predicted by AI, coloured by how sure the model is. Try P16933, a protein from the split gill fungus that grows on dead wood in Finnish forests.
The tool from the lecture. Start with the four examples at the bottom of the page. They always work. Folding your own sequence depends on the service being up, and it was down on the day.
Every week I take one organism and read what its biology actually does, in a short Reading. Some of the examples in this talk started there.
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Raphael Kim is a designer and researcher working with living matter, AI and design.
Biodesign Academy helps designers, educators and students work with biology and AI in plain language. What is an AI-native biodesigner?
Thank you to Barbara Pollini, Ena Naito and Alba Arillo García for the invitation.
Biodesign Academy