Lukas Adrian Jurk

Department: Social Design
Website: lukas-adrian-jurk.com

Machina Synthetica Communicatia

What: A reinvention of smartphone technology, using synthetic DNA to create an environmentally friendly organism that we can interact with in a more natural way.

Why: Recent developments in synthetic biology open up the possibility of biological machines, leading to a new relationship with our devices. Intrigued by that thought, and aiming for a less polluting phone industry, Lukas Jurk proposes to design DNA to redesign the smartphone.

How: Instead of the sealed inanimate boxes that we hold to our ears now, his ‘living smartphone’ interacts with us organically. Residing on our skin, this ‘fellow being’ responds to body movement. There’s no need for electricity as it feeds on blood glucose: from product and user to extra organ and host.

“We could grow a phone in an artificial womb”