For science! DIYBIO #2 @ MadLab

This week saw the second meeting of the Manchester branch (chapter?) of DIYBio. I attended the first meeting purely to have a look-see and take a few photos for Madlab, and found it so interesting that I've decided to get stuck right in.

As discussed in the first meeting, we're kicking things off with a relatively modest project, the Manchester Microbe map. I see this project as a kickstarter rather than a true maiden project, but it's definitely a solid foundation to build on for the group, and will not only allow us to see who can offer what to the group, but will also let us begin to think about where DIYBio Manchester is heading in terms of future projects.

The discussion throughout was great this time around, with the focus switched more to the group members as opposed to last month's more structured introductory talk, and it was awesome to see people from all sorts of backgrounds getting stuck in and chucking ideas around. Like I mentioned last time, I was really concerned that I'd be in a minority of creatives compared to scientists, but this isn't the case at all: there's a great mix of people involved.

Part of the session was quite a hands-on part, explaining how to take microbial samples from objects accurately. I'm sure that for the biologists in the room this part was everyday run-of-the-mill stuff, but for someone like me who has no experience with any of this, it was quite interesting to get my hands dirty (literally). We took samples of our hand-prints, and I also managed to take a good sample of the zoom lens on my camera: I'm not sure I want to see what will grow from four years of accumulated gigs and festivals, but it's for science I suppose. :)

The second half of the evening was a round-table discussion into the specifics of the Microbe Map project, and it was great to see that most people agreed on most bits of the plan (at least, I think they did). There was some interesting discussion on the ethics involved in anything we do, which I found surprising: even though all we're going to be doing is swabbing things, full permissions need to be granted so that our bases are covered. We decided that some sort of blanket authorisation would work best, so for example someone at the council could give us the OK, or perhaps someone involved in the transport network could give us a general OK to go ahead. I think that this is something that's still being worked out, but by the sounds of it this consideration is certainly going to affect how the project turns out.

In terms of specifics, the plan will be to try and sample Manchester in the same very specific timeframe, rather than say, over a week or so. This will allow us (as Martyn Amos put it) to take a biological 'snapshot' of Manchester, which means in turn that we'll have a slightly more focused set of results. We've agreed on May 4th to get together at Madlab, run out and sample whatever it is we're sampling, and return them back to Madlab at the same time. I'm still not 100% sure I can make it due to it being my anniversary, but there's plenty of people involved so we should get a good range of samples hopefully.

Even at this early stage I'm already considering the end results, in terms of visualising whatever data we come up with. On the night I really tried to push for people taking photographs in addition to collecting data about each sample, which will be really helpful. I have no idea where I'd want to take this visually yet, I'm currently investigating if there are any others in the group that would like to collaborate on this end of things, and of course we're waiting on specifics of the study to be announced. Once I get more info and have a think, I'll probably outline my plans in another post (incidentally, if anyone's reading this who's at the more creative end of the spectrum, please drop me an email or catch me at the next meet-up!)

So yes, game on. We're starting small, but hopefully this little taster will grow into something amazing. For science!

For more up-to-date discussion there's a Google group for DIYBio_MCR, a dedicated twitter feed, the Madlab website, and of course this humble blog. :)

Tate Installation - What I Learned

The installation project that I was working on for the Tate Liverpool is finally finished and installed, and has been running for a few days. It turned out really nicely, although the process was a lot different to my usual kind of project. While I'm happy with the final result, there's a lot I'd do differently if I tried to tackle something like this again (and hopefully I will). Here's what I learned:

Choose your technology wisely.
I made the projector in Flash, as a dual-screen AIR application. The primary screen is the user-facing input part, where people write their comments. This screen also serves as the admin screen if a password is entered into the comment area. The second 'screen' is actually the projection itself. I used this handy class to make life easier, but it was still a bit of a pain making sure that focus was doing what I wanted. I'm also really concerned that the Flash player might be prone to crapping the bed when it's been left running for a few days, it's not something I've got much experience with.Only time will tell if it stays stable, it's been a few days and I've not heard anything. In hindsight, I kind of wish I'd gone with my initial plan to use Processing, but I ended up taking the comfortable option and going with the technology I knew best, despite the advantages that Processing would have given me. Ah well.

Testing an installation project is hard.
Working on a regular monitor for a piece that's eventually going to be a few meters wide is a total nightmare. I spent days working with font sizes that looked completely natural on-screen, but looked totally different when we projected. About halfway through the build we rigged up a McGyver-style setup in the studio (see below) and managed to approximate a projection at the right size, and immediately realised that the fonts were still miniscule. Whoops. Next time around, I'm going to try and run the maths on it first: if the client wants a certain text size (in inches for example) then I need to sit down beforehand and figure out what size to set my assets at. It would still need testing, but my approach on this one wasn't even an educated guess and really created a lot of extra work.

Never underestimate people's creativity when it comes to profanity.
Filtering swearwords was the biggest concern I had for the entire build. In the past I'd done some very basic filtering, but only for things like websites and apps. It doesn't really do much damage if someone decides to fill my forms with swearwords. However, if someone sneaks a few creatively-formatted cuss words through at a crowded Tate exhibition, it's potentially a huge deal. I ended up going for a three-tiered approach that seems to have a worked alright. I won't go into the technical specifics (that's a whole post on it's own) but it essentially checks input against a massive list, then searches for the more common words within words, including common letter/number substitutions. I tested what I thought was a solid system very early on, mainly through my Facebook friends, and within a few minutes realised that people are immensely clever at subverting filters and ruining my day. Hilarious as it was, the testing proved invaluable, and meant that I came up with what I'd like to think is a pretty robust system. I've not had an angry call from the Tate yet, so that's reassuring.

Letting staff edit content without the use of a mouse, is a pain.
The screen has a password-controlled admin screen that allows the staff at the exhibition to quickly access the user comments, in date/time order, and very quickly disable any offensive or unsuitable comments. This was an important feature: I was pretty confident in my profanity filtering, but of course there's a lot you can do without swearing. My big issue was the lack of a mouse, so I had to handle screen-to-screen focusing cleverly to make sure the user couldn't get out of place or lock themseleves out of the screen. Turned out really well though.

Block that keyboard.
In addition to filtering out swearwords, I needed to make sure that nobody was going to kill the presentation or alt-tab out of it, or whatever. This was absolutely mission-critical, and should really have been the very very first thing I sorted out, but of course I ended up getting stuck into the visuals and leaving it til last. Mistaaaake! Luckily, I found this little app that allowed us to quickly disable a lot of the keys. Again, if I'd done this in Processing I could have done this myself as part of the app, which would have been a much more streamlined solution than relying on a second external app to handle key blocking. Not to worry though.

Overall I'm very happy with how it went from a technical perspective. There was nothing that went particularly 'wrong' with it, I just think that with a little more planning in advance I could have saved myself time, and made life easier.

We did end up slightly simplifying it visually, just so we knew it would work. Again, this wasn't a mistake as such, I just kind of wished I'd done a bit more testing to see what I could have gotten away with. I also think this would have been a great learning experience had I picked Processing over Flash, but of course that comes with the risk of things not going as smoothly as it did due to be me using an environment I'm familar with. Perhaps there's better projects to cut my teeth on than ones that are going to be projecting in front of hundreds of people. Hmm.

Anyway, I really enjoyed the experience overall, and will definitely jump at the chance to do something like this again. If you're in Liverpool in the next two months, go check it out.