Blind Data: Celebrating Science and Design

Dana Centre, London 10–11 February. See http://go.nature.com/QhPGsZ

The offspring of a speed-dating mixer between young scientists and designers is exhibited at London's Dana Centre this week. On display are prototypes of three designs that communicate the broad themes of energy and recycling, synthetic and systems biology and imaging. The winning entries were selected from the ideas of 30 pairs of graduate students who were introduced at an interdisciplinary speed-dating event in May last year.

Installations in the Blind Data exhibition include a 'neuroplastic' playground with translucent polymer surfaces that change colour when touched or warmed. The adaptive space mirrors the brain changes that occur when we interact with our environment. Another display shows clothing and furniture that makes use of a living, bacteria-enhanced fabric that can degrade or grow. A third installation translates human facial expressions into fractal patterns on a screen in real time, through which viewers can experiment by controlling their emotions.

The project is a collaboration between the UK Medical Research Council and Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London, and follows on from a 2008 initiative that paired five textile designers with five Nobel laureates. One of those was biologist John Sulston, who with designer Carole Collet developed a line of biodegradable garden textiles and furniture that decayed in a manner resembling cell death, Sulston's field of expertise.

This year's student participants learned much from working across disciplines. “There are a lot of rules in something that you would think is a purely creative process,” remarked computational biologist Ev Yemini from the University of Cambridge, UK. Working on the emotion-driven fractals project with Céline Marcq of Central Saint Martins, he found that his logical suggestions were often dismissed by his partner because of artistic precedent.

The pair discovered that they had creative thinking in common: “A lot of lab work is intuition,” observed Yemini. But the key to their success was good communication. “It's not only finding a way to do things, it's also finding a way to talk to people,” explained Marcq.

Sulston welcomes exhibitions that get the public involved in science. Art can be a tool through which scientists can keep an ear open to their constituents, he says. “Science is culture, and we ignore that at our peril.”