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Last week I hired Micah & Caroline from WeAreaGoodCompany.com to design an extensible diybio logo and related illustrations. I gave them a quick intro to diybio and synthetic biology (see a lot of design notes here) and asked them to create artwork that could be used by diybio.org and built apon by regional groups + related organizations (diybio-nyc, bosslab, etc.). I stressed extensibility – the final design should support remixing by all interested parties.

Micah & Caroline are about halfway done and I want to show you their work so far and solicit comments and suggestions. Above all the graphics are intended to be a community resource, so they need to be built with community feedback.

They have worked on two things: an extensible diybio logo and diybio themed icons.

logo

Micah & Caroline modified a typeface called “the mix” for the diybio logo to make it look hand-cut. When they are done they will provide the typeface for the community so that any group name can be written with it. As you can see, their current idea has been to cut out illustrations from the “golden days” of amateur science in the pattern of the typeface.

black-filled diybio text & icons

They have garnished this design with a rich wood background which I think goes far in dispelling the typical clinical, clean ethos of science imagery. But it’s also pretty “loud.”

diybio logo cut out of old science diagrams & engravings

icons

I also asked the team to design a set of reusable icons and illustrations that represent things common to diybio activities. I wasn’t very specific.

diybio logo and icons grayscale

What 10 icons should I ask them to design? This is really where feedback would be helpful. For instance, we could ask them to design:

A pipet; dsDNA; a microscope; a waste container; a falcon tube; e. coli; yeast; a petri dish; a generic chemical bottle; DNA sequence.

In this version they incorporated the icons into little bottle-cap pins to emphasize DIY approaches. (note: when they are finished they will provide the source illustrator files to maximize these kinds of reuse.)

diybio logo cutout of science diagrams with bottlecap logos

diybio logo variations

feedback

Please please please mail your feedback to this thread on the diybio google group or in the comments below. In particular, consider these two questions:

• what 10 icons should be designed?
• what graphical concepts should comprise the diybio logo?

Go check out my notes for my thoughts. I hope the artwork will be a graphical synthesis of (playfulness + art + DIY) + (science + engineering + biotechnology).

(I’m still thinking about a retro-arcade-game theme…)

Also see these other handy links:

• OpenWetWare went through an involved feedback process when they created their logo. They paid a lot of attention to technical details, like the handedness of DNA.
• Science Creative Quarterly’s merit badges – they designed a TON.

I’ll include my feedback in the comments with everyone else.

All this stuff is licensed CC-BY.

Here I go. Start off with something like “Bryan got to speak at H+ Summit 2009 and spotted some neat numbers.” Maybe this will end up in GBM or H+ magazine as a small blurb?

Bryan Bishop presented at the 2009 H+ Summit onopen source hardware and took copious notes. Here he presents some of his favorites:

Patri Friedman. Meeting him in person is like meeting with a living legend. Hell, he wrote the book on seasteading. His talk was short and to the point: let’s make startups for governments and ways of organizing people. You know how everyone says let a thousand flowers bloom? Same thing going on here, except he’s serious about it. The Seasteading Institute is a 501c3 non-profit organization dedicated to living on the high seas and promoting a diversity of ways of living and organizing groups of people. At the end of the talk he gave a shout-out to the DIY scene: 12 miles off the coast, there is no FDA. The talk was recorded and is somewhere here, and here’s the transcript. I didn’t catch the Q&A because I was up next! What a talk to follow.

Todd Huffman also talked (transcript). Todd organized BIL, the simple and free alternative to TEDtalks. Todd spoke about whole brain emulation and his startup, 3Scan. He showed some really amazing videos collected from his team back at TAMU running off of a knife-edge microscope. His plan is to slice and dice brain tissue so as to scan in details all the way down to mitochondrial positions in order to parameterize and seed emulations and simulations of brains.

Gregory Benford (transcript) also showed up and talked about personal genomics, or what he calls “nutrigenomics”. It turns out that he bought the original Methuselah flies. The Methuselah flies were super-longevity flies living well beyond average lifespans. With these flies he sequenced their genome and found particular up-promoted and down-regulated genes that might be causing the flies to live longer. The idea is to then synthesize custom pharmaceuticals that enable and disable gene regulation for different (but targeted) genes in the human body. Greg is really amazing in person, although maybe that’s just me being a fanboy for his scifi after all these years? At some point you go “wtf, I’m having a one-on-one with Gregory Benford!” (He was also at the Singularity Summit earlier this year.)

You should also check out Anselm Levskaya‘s talk on brain input/output projects, Dylan Morris, and Christine Peterson had some good suggestions for not dying.

And one final plug- there’s no transcript for me because I was presenting (!) on open source hardware (1, 2, 3).

hplusmag - winter 2009 - cover "Hi there, Ray"

Parijata Mackey wrote an article for the Winter 2009 h+ magazine about diybio titled “diybio: a growing movement takes on aging.” She provides an overview of diy -hardware, -software, and -wetware, and gives shoutouts to some of the projects listed at diybio.org/projects (man we gotta develop a better system for collecting projects).  Overall she provides an overview of where diybio came from and where it’s going in an optimistic manner consistent with h+. She also provides tantalizing interview coverage with John Schloendorn concerning his DIY SENS lab and biotech co-working space in the Bay Area.

Andrew Hessel wrote another article called “Why DIY Bio” in which he explains his vision, based on open source & synthetic biology principles, for a distributed, open anti-cancer research collective. He calls it Pink Army.

UPDATE: slashdotted on 26 Jan 2010.