Cellularity is a design project that examines the social and technological impacts of being able to create life in the laboratory.
As a designer, I have collaborated with a team of UK researchers who are attempting to build artificial chemical cells that imitate selected properties of natural cells. As well as having potential technological applications, chemical cells could lead to a new understanding of how living and nonliving things differ from one another.
To explore these impacts, I have imagined how chemical cells could develop as a pharmaceutical technology and have designed The Cellularity Scale – a speculative definition of life that is applicable in a future where we no longer ask whether something is dead or alive, but instead, how alive it is.
