2.6.2023
DESIGN X BIOINFORMATICS meets Network Biology
A Student Workshop at Royal College of Art 2023
Since the era of our cave-drawing ancestors, humans have possessed innate cognitive faculties that are naturally engaged by diagrams. Diagrams notably play a key role in conveying information in biology. Such diagrams can be found, e.g., in every good handbook for biology.
The need for standardizing the representation of biological diagrams became apparent in the 2000’s with the advent of computational systems biology – that focused on building, exchanging and analysing large and complex diagrams representing the molecular events occurring in whole biological systems. Therefore, a community composed of biochemists, modellers, and computer scientists developed, the Systems Biology Graphical Notation (SBGN), a set of standard visual languages designed for the representation of biochemical networks in a consistent and clear manner. But although this standard is now around for a few years, continuously new challenges are coming up which need to be tackled – therefore, the standard and the way it is communicated is continuously evolving.
In 2022, we kicked-off the DESIGN X BIOINFORMATICS initiative with a one day workshop. One of the presentations introduced already the idea of standardization in systems biology.
Therefore, we decided to provide this year on June 2 2023 a workshop introducing and discussing SBGN. During the workshop, you will learn the basics of network biology, get an introduction to SBGN, and you will be introduced to a tool which can be used to draw corresponding maps. Two SBGN developers will be present at the workshop.
During the design activity, the workshop will explore together with you different ideas how to improve network biology representations and visualizations. We will come up with three different briefs and you will work in groups to tackle the challenges.
Moreover, we will announce a student competition based on this design activity during the workshop which will run until 18th June!
For details and to register, please have a look here.
DESIGN X BIOINFORMATICS – the initiative
With this initiative, we are intending to bring together Bioinformaticians from various fields, and designers, design researchers, as well as medical and scientific illustrators to discuss future challenges in the context of Bioinformatics and Design.
Being an area which often combines abstract and spatial data, and often taking standardisation approaches into account, Bioinformatics provides a number of opportunities for future designers.
2.12.2023
Student Competition 2022 Winners Announced
Congratulations go to all our winners! Thanks go also to all contributors and our committee for contributing to this challenge! More info here.
9.9.2022
DESIGN X BIOINFORMATICS 2022: A hybrid workshop in London
On Friday September 9, the DESIGN X BIOINFORMATICS workshop took place. This was indeed the first time that our new IDE/GID studio in Battersea was used for a workshop!
We had around 70 participants in London in-person, more than 130 participants online, and additional in-person participation from Paris. We kicked of a very fruitful discussion concerning Bioinformatics, Biovisualization and its relation to Design and had a great hands-on workshop organized by Zowie and Louis from Fashion.
Two sessions, BIOINFORMATICS 2 DESIGN, and DESIGN 2 BIOINFORMATICS were accompanied by keynotes by David Goodsell from the Scripps Research Institute and Daria Jelonek from Studio Above&Below.
More info is available from here.
Probably for now, we generated more questions than answers, but exactly this was the idea of this workshop!
Thanks go to our attendees, committee members and amazing speakers!
Get the poster for DESIGN X BIOINFORMATICS for here!
16.8.2022
DESIGN X BIOINFORMATICS 2022 – Special Issue published
A special issue in the Journal of Integrative Bioinformatics which was published in Special Issue 2/2022 (more at the Special Issue website).
