The "Public" versus User Experience Design
Counterpoint exploration of synthetic biology and its relationship to the "public"
A few weeks ago I had the great privilege to be supported by the ARC Centre of Excellence in Synthetic Biology to attend an OECD Conference at Stanford University. The theme was the governance of synthetic biology, and it was run as a side session to the Spirit of Asilomar Conference that had occurred earlier that week. Now I didn't attend the Spirit of Asilomar, but I did get a condensed read out. If Asilomar was the bioreactor, I drank the partially-distilled end product from a fire-hose.
One of the core concepts that was woven through participants reflections on the Spirit of Asilomar was the idea of “the public”.
We in the Ivory Tower have a habit of fashioning castles from stones called “the public”, and it’s long been an idea I wanted to more deeply examine. After hearing the OECD discussions and reading others’ reflections, this is my take on the grand edifice we like to make of the public square.
As a student of communications, my first theoretical introduction to the public sphere came through the work of Jürgen Habermas. His tome was one of the first academic books I voluntarily read even though it wasn’t on a tutorial reading list. He loosely runs the thesis that the soiree became the coffee house, transformed into the newspaper and seeded the public sphere. End result, gossip and news formalised into the fourth estate. But Habermas worked in a world that had no social media. There was then no digital mirror to hold up so we could look at society’s darkest edges.
Today, the public has bifurcated, merged, converged, and exploded across digital space. Opinion echo chambers abound. We now have more in common with someone halfway around the world than our neighbour because that kid in Mexico likes the same Spotify playlists as us, but our neighbour is deep on Bach’s Fugues. So what is this thing called the public anyway, and why does it matter when we talk about advanced biotechnology?
Let's pluralise the public
First stop on our train ride through the re-public is to own that there is no such singular noun. While I still don’t like it, the term publics is still more accurate than flinging darts at a drone with a handmade 1:10 scale trebuchet. Once we accept there never was and never will be a singular public we can tear down our false notions of that amorphous other. Edward Said’s Orientalism is good reading here. Many of the occident/orient binaries Said identified similarly blind biotechnologists in the way they once did Whitehall.
Yet it is not enough to plurualise the public, we also need to pluralise individuals and collectives within that body due to temporal state change. People don’t hold the same opinions their whole lives. Progress isn’t linear, culture isn’t static and context is king.
First use of an advanced biotechnology tends to coincide with the perception of catastrophic threat. French vine growers grafted American root systems onto their vines in the 1870s to counter the Great Wine Blight. Root grafting went through rigorous scientific testing and was considered one of the most advanced biotechnologies of the time. mRNA vaccines received emergency authorisation in response to Covid. Threat perception drives first use across the technology spectrum.
The truly acute days of climate change are still in front of us. Great power dynamics are bubbling in a pot that’s only getting hotter. These two intertwined trends mean the thresholds for first use of advanced biotech are coming down. I’ll give you an example.
I volunteered with the Australian Institute of International Affairs in Sydney for a decade. When I began I was in my mid 20s, the main thing I learnt aside from geopolitics 101 was how to work a corridor from retired diplomats who came through a period in Australian history when nuclear energy was political poison. Fast forward ten years and we had interns regularly presenting papers on why nuclear energy was important to consider when thinking about mitigating climate change. This signaled a fundamental change in public opinion divided along generational lines. I know it’s only anecdotal evidence, but I’ve seen the observation hold in other contexts. Younger generations feel climate change is an existential risk, they are therefore more likely to gravitate towards technological solutions that older generations might shy away from. This is as true of biotechnology as it is of nuclear reactors.
Consultations on the nuclear fuel lifecycle take forever. Whether it’s end-of-life waste processing or storage, each is a fascinating analog for thinking about biotechnological visions and their relationship to the public. Technologies that someone may approve of in the abstract may not be so palatable when people clothed in fluoro HAZMAT are burying them next door. Context is everything and publics need to be plurualised in relation to the factors governing a particular business model or a technological adoption strategy.
Shipping the product
Counterpoint trigger warning - this is pure red team argument and does not represent my own views, yet...
Is the public a relevant consideration to much of biotechnology in the abstract or the main? I’ve never heard of winemakers, brewers or cheese-makers consulting the public on their new product. They just order up market analysis and do product design. It’s the same for software. Sure big tech might do public relations, advertising and government relations, but that’s brand management. When it comes to a new product they do user experience (UX) design.
A few years back I had the luxury of sitting in on an internal software project that lasted two years. I’ve watched experienced UX designers run through user personas, discuss use cases, and validate insights through these sessions. There is a standard method to this, and the only ingredients are a product ready for user acceptance testing (UAT), an Adobe subscription and a professional anthropologist. Is biotechnology so special that it needs to be different?
Do consumers care where a product comes from, or do they base their purchasing patterns on preference portfolios that clump into population-level groupings?
Fuel is a good example of this. If there was a petrol that was carbon negative due to gaseous waste fermentation, would biotechnology even be part of the advertising? No, big energy would spend a diamond mine refining the smoothest possible brand name for their revolutionary new green fuel. It’d probably end up named something like AeraMax High Performance.
Paracetamol is another example. I only recently realised paracetamol comes from oil. Moves are now underway, however, to ferment it in yeast.1 How much do you care where your paracetamol comes from if it is molecule-for-molecule the same?
Do you prefer the “tradition” of chemically refining extracted petrochemicals to create a substance that was never before seen in nature prior to 1873, do you prioritise climate change mitigation over product source, or is a bull run on ExxonMobil’s share price your only source of joy?
The reality is, none of these things have anything to do with method. Insofar as consumers care about the method in which their products are made you’d think people would eat a lot less chicken.
Only the other day I saw a thread on LinkedIn calling out the false dichotomy of natural vs non-natural.2 This is a concept that only makes sense in human language and to which the global biome could neither care nor worry. Evolution will look after the planet, but it is unlikely to look after humanity.
I’d argue biotechnology is as rooted in post-modern consumer dynamics and surveillance capitalism as any other industry. Shipping the product is what matters. Method is patent, publication, and branding. To the extent the public sphere cares about any of this is limited to the influence, success and scale of communication campaigns that seek to speak for or on behalf of that amorphous other called the public.
We all love anthropologists
Let’s jump out of counterpoint land now.
To get funded, published or promoted in science you have to do something new. As a consequence the entire modern research system is built on strong structural drivers for newness. New ideas, new observations, new methods, new inventions and most of all, new words. This is synthetic biology’s major disadvantage.
It’s not actually new.
CRISPR-cas9 is a naturally occurring system that was discovered and reapplied. Kind of like seeds 15,000 years ago.
When one organism or biological mechanism takes a container of biological information and moves it to another substrate this is about as natural as you can get. Whether it's diplodocus eating a prehistoric avocado and allowing that genome to instantiate in a new location, whether it’s a virus stealing a gene and moving it across the world like a memetic nightmare, whether it’s procreation, or just humans finding interesting intracellular machinery in bacteria and using it to cut and paste genes a bit faster than before, it’s all the same thing. A relational matrix of infinite topographical depth, a moment of majesty flickering in the dying light of a setting sun, or life doing as life does.
I’m a big fan of Sextus Empiricus and the use of logical skepticism to find domains of truth or uncertainty. So I’ll lock down naturalness to this well-trodden observation made by octopi the world over: if it can happen, and does happen, then it is possible. Even things that can happen but haven‘t happened are still possible. This second category is a pretty difficult one to work with, especially for octopi, but they’re fairly adaptable beings. It’s the combination of these two categories that creates a possibility space we like to call life, and life is so damn natural it can evolve carbon-based bipedal organisms that have the capacity to invent the word natural to describe themselves.
How we or any other collective of people feel about a specific segment of nature’s possibility space underpins biotechnology’s relationship to the public. But it’s not a public, it’s not even a public(s). It’s people pushing the boundaries of life and trying to define appropriate avenues of exploration, experimentation and development. Arguably, it’s what makes humans different to octopi. But at the end of the day it’s still just life talking to life about life, evolution instantiated in contemplation of itself.
Obviously this is an anthropologist’s dream. It’s just too bad we don't have more of them running biodesign UX sessions.
Rise of the Public
Future Shock was written by Alvin Toffler in collaboration with Heidi Toffler in 1970 about the psychological impact of constant technological change considered at a population and cultural level. Technological change moves far faster today than it ever did in the 60s or 70s, and this goes for information too. Yet our conception of the public hasn’t come a long way. Too often we expect deficit model communication to work. Too often we can’t shake debunked hypodermic needle theories of communication that have never stacked up to reality.
The public isn’t scared of biotechnology, the public doesn’t stand in opposition to genetic engineering. The word “public” only crops up in English in the 13th century. While the term does trace its way back to the Latin form publicus, the Romans used to feed the occasional slave to a lamprey. Morals and ethics were slightly different back then. Indeed it wasn’t until the printing press and a 30 year war that tore Europe apart that contemporary ideas of the public start to mature. As we all know from Substack, the printing press looks a bit different today.
If we really want to shake off these “thought terminating cliches of the public” then we need to ensure science speaks to everyone, that good storytelling builds technological expectations and creates confidence in change. More scientists need to be telling their stories and their histories of thought. Substack has created a beautiful space for this to happen.
Scientific storytelling is not an exercise in proof, it’s problem space exploration abstracted through language. For biotechnology this means co-creating language that allows everyone to participate in the most incredible story on Earth. It means building shared tools that enable all to design, build, test and learn. It means pursuing biotech platforms that look like iPhones, not so that scientists can do whatever they want, but so that everyone can be a scientist in the same way that everyone can be a programmer.
Lack of access to a technology is not the same as opposition. Democratisation of technology means that a plurality of views will exist on how and why a technology should be used, as well as when it shoudn’t. Science should never shy away from the question why because those asking it haven’t earned their Scout stripes in the lab. Fundamentally basic questions fuel the pursuit of science. Indeed, we should always be asking more questions of science, not less. The public is where we go to crowdsource these questions, and this is a fact that UX designers know well but that biotechnology seems yet to realise.