Extrapolation Foundry, 2016-2019
Extrapolation Foundry developed a series of participatory futures workshops within private fundraising events at Ginkgo Bioworks. These gatherings brought speculative design into conversations about biotechnology’s development, inviting participants to explore how emerging capabilities might enter everyday life. Through drawing, discussion and collaborative making, participants considered the practices, relationships and expectations that could develop around biological technologies.
The concepts returned to the foundry as full-scale posters, creating a feedback loop between the events and the working research environment. Ideas generated in a social setting became recurring invitations to consider biotechnology’s creative possibilities and wider consequences. Their presence opened space for questions that extend beyond technical feasibility: whose needs might guide a research direction, what assumptions shape an imagined application, and how its use could affect people and other living systems.
Situated where research, funding and visions of the future meet, the series made those visions tangible and available for discussion. The posters carried questions from the gatherings back into the foundry, inviting reflection on how expectations about biotechnology’s role in society might inform the questions pursued within the lab.
See more documentation on Flickr: Extrapolation Foundry (2016) and Space x Biology (2017).
The concepts returned to the foundry as full-scale posters, creating a feedback loop between the events and the working research environment. Ideas generated in a social setting became recurring invitations to consider biotechnology’s creative possibilities and wider consequences. Their presence opened space for questions that extend beyond technical feasibility: whose needs might guide a research direction, what assumptions shape an imagined application, and how its use could affect people and other living systems.
Situated where research, funding and visions of the future meet, the series made those visions tangible and available for discussion. The posters carried questions from the gatherings back into the foundry, inviting reflection on how expectations about biotechnology’s role in society might inform the questions pursued within the lab.
See more documentation on Flickr: Extrapolation Foundry (2016) and Space x Biology (2017).
