Design Fictions: A Kit That Sniffs Out Future Pandemics
Susana Soares and Mikael Metthey designed a set of delicate, strangely beautiful tools to capture and analyze germs and prevent the next pandemic.
How will the disease-hunters of the future get a grip on impending pandemics before they overrun the world, Outbreak-style? In Susana Soares and Mikael Metthey's imagining, these "pathogen hunters" will be equipped with a toolkit of delicate, botanical-looking instruments to capture, analyze, and track the various bacteria and viruses we're all mixing and matching a million times a day just by living our everyday lives. The gear may look weird, but the two designers developed this "Pathogen Hunter" concept in collaboration with scientists in the Diagnostic and Therapeutic Technologies Department at Newcastle University, so it's not totally out of the realm of possibility.
Soares and Metthey's instruments are designed to be carried by Gattaca-like biosurveillance agents, who would use them to scrape, sniff, pluck, and trap microbial samples from our skin, hair, body, and everyday objects that we touch and breathe and sweat on all the time (doorknobs, faucets, subway poles). It's a sinister-sounding purpose, which is why the physical design of the instruments takes such a strangely ephemeral tack: they look more like alien plant life trapped in plastic than standard-issue chrome plated medical equipment. The idea would be to embed "nano-enabled sensor systems" in them to detect whether anything fishy was going on. These sensors don't exist yet, but that's where the scientists at Newcastle would come in: they expect (according to the press release) "that this technology will be available in commercial products within 5 to 10 years time."
The instruments' mysterious sensual appeal would probably make them less intrusive to rub over your skin or breathe samples into... at least at first. Over time, those delicate translucent forms would probably acquire negative associations just like the bird-flu facemasks and hypodermic needles we associate with contagion today. But as a speculative alternative, "Pathogen Hunter" is pretty intriguing. Check out the slideshow to see for yourself.
