Project Working Title: mCloud Sensor
Design Domains: Critical Design, Speculative Design, Alternate Futures, Design Fiction
Project Domains: data privacy, internet of things, AI, microbiome, metagenomics, DNA sequencing
Working project description: mCloud Sensor is an app that easily integrates into your mobile device. Leveraging technologies from Nanopore (MinIon is a portable device for molecular analysis https://www.nanoporetech.com/) and from CRISPR (http://www.wired.com/2015/07/crispr-dna-editing-2/ http://gizmodo.com/everything-you-need-to-know-about-crispr-the-new-tool-1702114381) the app allows the user to identify the unique microbial cloud signatures of individuals in a room. Like fingerprinting and DNA matching, mCloud Sensor is a tool for identifying individuals, yet can be achieved in only milliseconds right in the palm of your hand. Thus the app has implications in forensic science as well as surveillance. Linked to machine learning algorithms that monitor an individual's on-line activities, the app can make link an individual's past behavior to his/her genetic traits to accurately make predictions about his/her personality. The various features of the app allow the user to identify rooms/areas/cities to avoid that are not in line with their microbial and genetic state as well as make recommendations for gene-edited microorganisms to help an individual achieve desired states of health, intelligence, etc.
mCloud Sensor is an artifact of a future (not too distant from now) when humans have the ability to understand ourselves far better than we do today. Humans understand that they are biomolecular networks - Holobionts. And they have learned to control their environments with increasingly effective precision - even at the genetic and microbial level. Humans are far more connected. With data trails being mined in vast GigaFactories around the world, an individual's behaviors are tracked at every scale: from DNA, to microbe, to internet. The internet's web of connections is multiplied by the inclusion of genetic and microbial data, which in its totality, can make predictions about a person that feels like "premonition" but it is not, it is an algorithmic and mathematical determination of your quantified self.
mCloud Sensor is a critique of current trends in technology, biology and Big Data. The project also seeks to highlight isomorphisms across scale.
Precedents:
https://medium.com/re-form/better-living-through-germs-af87a07ba35f#.r46qty17r
http://cargocollective.com/timkim/following/all/timkim/Fart-Alarm
http://www.designresearchsociety.org/docs-procs/DRS2010/PDF/047.pdf