Syns: Feedback on a design experiment
This is a paper that has been presented at Neolife SLSA 2015 going through the research process of Syns which includes preliminary researches, development of the speculation and its deployment, and finally the future development of the project.
INTRODUCTION
Western societies are nowadays driven by three main structural mutations. They highly rely on the power of information, their model is still articulated around consumerism and their citizens are increasingly afflicted with non-communicable diseases, such as obesity.
In this context, we are looking for solutions to those unplanned new kind of diseases. Currently most of them depend on the use of data. With movements such as the Quantified Self, individuals are encouraged to measure different physiological metrics, in order to understand their body and improve their health. Although we can question the efficiency and utility of this approach to health for the general public.
During the Summer 2014, I intended a Summer School organised by the ETH Zurich where we scientifically compared the results given by everyday measurements objects with the results given by scientifically reliable method.. Among those objects there were weighers (Omicron, Tanita…) and wearables (Fitbit…), their results being compared with scientifically reliable measurement methods such as DEXA Scan for body fat. In short, what we observed is that those marketed objects were giving inacurate results, by underestimating body fat or overestimating physical activity for example. This means that those results are likely to lead to the wrong conclusion for people using them. In addition to this, the questions related to data privacy and ownership arise. In general, those owning the data collected by wearing a connected wristband are indeed the company producing the wristband and the application on which you read the measurements. Those companies can sell those data to whoever they want, and you, as a user, don’t have a clue about who access your data in the end.
Extending the idea of data measurement, we are promised, in a near future, to have nanotechnologies that would give us in real-time any kind of metrics we can imagine about our body. You can control using a smartphone application or a wristband, but can we say the same for nanotechnologies and other invasive technologies that evolves directly in our body? Would we suddenly rely only on those technologies to be healthy and lose any common sense when it comes to our own health? Questions regarding data privacy and who has access to our data becomes even more prominent in this setting. What if those technologies in my body were suddenly misused or hacked? Could I do something about it? Questioning can also be seen at a macro level: how would it change the health system? Would it change the meaning of health or healthy itself: from a condition where no disease are detected to a condition where all your data correspond to a ideal body data set?
I believe that it is essential to address those questions, and not only between experts, but between the public and experts to consider and discuss the social and cultural impact those technologies could have and reflect ontheir preferability.
SYNS: NEW FOOD PARADIGM
It is with this framework that I have pursued my master degree at the University of the Arts in Zurich. During my master I have explored different methods to trigger debate about the use of data and technology in food. We are confronted with food on a daily basis and in this sense anyone can relate to it. It also reveals culture and social behaviours observed in a society. In this sense, food culture and social rituals are interesting to observe as fragments reflecting the way technologies are embraced and used by society on a wider scale. Today, I will present one of the design experiments I made during my MA called Syns. It is envisaging how designers can engage an audience with complex systemic issues linked to food in relation to synthetic biology and act as a catalyst for public debate on the use of data and biotechnologies. This intervention is a way to address and investigate controversies related to the use of biotechnologies in our food by representing possible outcomes at the individual and systemic level through unsettling scenarios.
By asking myself how data and biotechnologies could impact our food, and most importantly the culture associated with it, I came to a change of food paradigm. As data is envisioned as a tool to customise objects and services, I adopted a vision where food is viewed as a material to be “tailor-made” for each individual. Building on this paradigm, I imagined a scenario where a so-called innovative company called Syns would produce such a food. It embodies the most optimal food system imaginable by relying on individual’s health and personal data. On one hand, it insures the best diet, and by extension health, for each individual. It evaluates the physiological and psychological food needs of a person thanks to her data, and then creates a specific food for her using synthetic biologies and genetic engineering. On the other hand, it uses data to manage the food production and avoid any food or energy waste.
In such a system, the notion of health is brought as an excuse for the massive use of technologies in the food industry. Indeed, Syns promises to ensure the well-being of everyone by caring about direct and indirect health factors, respectively represented by food and environmental sustainability. Like this, it allows the massive, and some would say intrusive, use of data on which relies the system. It also legitimises the use of genetic technologies, and more specifically synthetic biology, in the production of food. Consumer’s data are analysed and translated in genetic sequences. It is then enclosed in a seed that will grow into a plant producing the desired customised food. In this way, they are supposed to perfectly answer the physiological and psychological needs of a person.
SYSTEMIC VIEW
This new food paradigm, embodied by Syns, is revealed through the eyes of three characters, Hélène, Nathan and Antoine, telling different sides of Syns story through fictional interviews. Each of them mirrors stakeholders we can observe in our society in order to create reference points for the audience. To reinforce the account of each protagonists, the whole scenario takes place in France, a country having a rich culinary culture and tradition.
Hélène: Food Activist
Hélène is a self-proclaimed food activist. She proposes a critical view of the system by showing its weaknesses on a social and cultural levels and offers an answer to this through the definition of a different food perception. By observing her environment, she finds out that food is the utmost individualistic daily actin her contemporary society. From this observation, she decides to transform the act of eating as a social moment for people to interact and share their food with each other. Like this, she hopes to create community identity around food. Although during one of her social eating experiment, she stumbled upon an unpredicted challenge: food allergy, a health issue that had fully disappeared with the food produced by Syns. After this unfortunate experience, she engages herself against the Syns system on a more ethical level by denouncing the dependance the whole population has toward it.
Hélène’s story should resonate quite directly with the viewer for two reasons. First, it refers to emerging eating habits, such as eating alone, linked to our modern lifestyle and inadvertently supported by some technologies. For example the arrival of the TV in households enabled the phenomena of the couch potato: individuals eating badly and alone in front of their TV screen. The same happens at work with people eating in front of their computer. Although Hélène is obviously advocating more traditional eating habits where mealtime is considered a strong social moment. Secondly, Hélène is pointing out a growing fact in our society, even if it can be considered invisible for the majority of the population. We are actually relying on a handful of companies for the production of our food and more specifically for the seeds production. In this sense, Syns brings to an extreme this growing tendency and urges us to consider the issue.
Nathan, Syns Lead Product Manager
The second interview introduces us to Nathan, Lead Product Manager of Syns. As a representative of Syns, he explains in detail how the service functions. He explains how customised meals are produced, from data to plants, as well as promotes the goodwill and humanist values of the company. He also introduces us to a range of products offered by Syns, namely Basic, Care, Mobility and Variety.
The Basic package corresponds to the core offer of Syns: making customised food out of personal and health data. The Care package has a more advanced approach to insure the consumer’s health by additionally including genetic data. This allegedly allows the food to interact optimally with the consumer’s body and prevent disease development. The Mobility package takes also into account the travels planned by the consumer in order for the consumer to access fresh food anywhere he goes thanks to an adaptation in Syns production system to produce locally the food according to the consumer’s location. Finally, the Variety pack offers the introduction of meat in the diet, whereas the other offers are fully vegetarian. This meat is grown from plants using techniques inspired by in-vitro culture. This last package fulfills no particular physiological need, but is more aimed at expressing a social status and personal values.
Nathan character can be quickly related to today’s startups. In the same fashion as corporations, he presents Syns as a benevolent entity which solutions are described as perfect without any side-effect. This speech is already shaken by the points shown by Hélène previously. It also seems a bit at odd with the offers proposed by Syns. Even if promising the best adaptive diet for anyone, Syns still has several product ranges which customise even more a supposedly already highly personalised diet. In fact, by being the main food producer and distributor, Syns is obviously using its position to foster a consumerist attitude toward its own products and is plainly taking advantage of its monopoly.
Antoine, Chef
The last interview presents us Antoine a former worldwide recognised chef. He narrates his own life and explains how his work as a chef has bolstered the acceptance of Syns. He explored the tension between the visual perception of food and its nutritional quality, in a movement called Biohealthic Gastronomy. Like this, he created extravagant ways of presenting organic and healthy food that most of the time looked like they came out a sci-fi movie. By doing this, Antoine was aiming at reconciling the notion of healthy food and science, as both seems sometimes to be opposite in the collective imaginary, especially when science is involved in food production. As his approach to food gained in popularity, many copycats appeared, through the creation of restaurants or specialised blogs. Eventually the whole process, widely popular and accepted, was brought to an industrial level by Syns. This slowly killed any innovation made at an “artisanal” level, such as in restaurants, and led slowly to the death of any culinary tradition. Antoine also offers us glimpses of strange amenities installed in public spaces, with the apparition of microwaves ovens in subway stations, for example, in order to warm-up your Syns meal on the go.
By giving a historical perspective on the whole fiction, Antoine builds a bridge between our reality and the speculated one, thanks to which the audience can draw a link between today’s society and the one depicted in the fiction. With his story, he also points out how trendsetters in the culinary realm, such as chef, bloggers or reality shows, can have an impact on our acceptation of change and technology. By making it accepted and desirable, a whole novel technology can enter the realm of the mundane. In this sense, the impact that a technology can have on the society can be considered a collective responsibility.
DISCUSSING
The use of interviews, as the mean to tell the story, brings a realistic and plausible aspect to the narrative as if it was happening. Additionally, those interviews mirror systems and realities we are familiar with, but bring some bits of it to extremes whereas other bits play the cards of everydayness and mundanity. Those elements help the viewer to enter and understand the fiction. He is also able to hold simultaneously different points of view thanks to the crossing of each interviewee perspective. With this big picture in mind and by being able to relate quite directly with the fiction environment, the viewer can then reverse-engineer and consider it critically in perspective of his own reality.
For example, in the case of data and privacy, we are confronted with questions regarding our privacy linked to online activities. Now it extends to our health data with the development of tracking devices and health applications. This issue is also present in Syns, where it is brought to an extreme. In Syns, a second question coming out of the use of data is the translation of those data into some conclusion or actionable knowledge. In this case, food is shaped by the data through the use of synthetic biology. Here, we have to connect data of various nature such as the properties of natural food, to get inspiration from for the synthetic one, the composition of a person microbiota, to understand how she is likely to interact with given foods, or else a person’s physiological need, to determine what she needs in term of energy source. This is a highly complex system to create and we are in the right to wonder how accurate this system would be and if it would favorise some type of people over others because some criteria would have been disregarded for some reason.
Even if those fictions have been created in the first place to serve a general goal of debate and discussion about the use of data and biotechnologies in our food and its potential impact on our food culture, they can be used to explore specific areas. This is what I did during the University of the Arts Zurich master exhibition in June 2015. I wanted to explore what are nowadays influencing people in their diet choices or their eating habits. To do so, in parallel of the movie, I installed walls where people could answer questions asked to them at the end of each interview.
This aimed at making them reflect actively about their own beliefs and habits about food. At the end of October 2015, I will conduct a workshop at the Lift Basel where the movies will be framed into raw material to build upon additional scenarios questioning precise points brought by the original movies. This process aims at enabling the participants to have discussions about the topics by constructing their arguments based on their personal beliefs and knowledge. The friction points happening during those conversations are the bits I am looking for because of the critical role they might play in the future shaping of the use of biotechnologies. In this perspective, the movies should not be considered an end in themselves, but as ground material on which to build constructed debates. It should be seen as an invitation to reflect on and discuss food and technologies even if you are not an expert on it.
