Dialysis Sheep, sacrificial lambs, Black Sheep, and speculative design’s publics

In an era of xenotransplantation and human-sheep chimera, Revital Cohen‘s Life Support project (RCA Design Interactions, 2008) asks “Could animals be transformed into medical devices?” and “Could a transgenic animal function as a whole mechanism and not simply supply the parts? Could humans become parasites and live off another organism’s bodily functions?”

Interesting questions, and I find myself deeply affected by Cohen’s Dialysis Sheep concept:

A patient suffering from kidney failure gives a blood sample to the lab, the scientists cut from the patients’ genome the regions that code for blood production (bone marrow tissues), and immune response (the major histocompatibility complex). They then extract the genome from the nucleus of a somatic cell taken from a sheep and substitute the corresponding regions of the sheep’s genome with the DNA cut from the patients’ genome.

This recombinant DNA is then inserted into the nucleus of a pre-prepared sheep egg cell. Cell division in the egg is initiated and after a few divisions implanted into the receptive ewe.

The surrogate ewe gives birth to the transgenic lamb, which is given to the donor patient.

During the day, the dialysis sheep is free to roam in the patient’s back garden, graze to cleanse its kidneys, and drink water containing salt minerals, calcium and glucose.

At night, the sheep is placed on a special platform at the patient’s bedside. The transgenic sheep’s kidneys are connected via blood lines to the patient’ s fitsula (a surgicaly enlarged vein). During the night, peristaltic pumps remove waste products from the patient’s blood by pumping it out of the body, through the sheep’s kidney (a natural, organic filtering system) and returning it, cleaned, to the patient.

This happens over and over again throughout the night. Each time the “clean” blood is returned to the body, it picks up more waste products from the cells it circulates through, and brings these newly-collected toxins back to the sheep’s kidney to be removed.

The sheep urinates the toxins.

Okay, first things first. When I say I’m “deeply affected” by this design, I mean that despite being struck by the beauty of some of the images, I am utterly horrified and disgusted by the concept. (How could someone think it’s acceptable to use an animal like this when we have machines that can do the same thing?!) But I’m also intellectually fascinated by it, and can’t stop thinking about it.

In principle, I share the desire to (re)vitalise what can be utterly dehumanising medical processes. For example, Elio Caccavale‘s Utility Pets (2003) project asked “What if we shared our homes with pigs bred to provide replacement human organs?” and part of the intention was to imagine a close relationship and emotional exchange between patient and organ donor. I like this idea and no more harm comes to the pig before it is killed/sacrificed than to a typical meat animal.

But using an animal as a blood filtering machine is different, and using a sheep to do this invokes an additional set of cultural connotations that are conspicuously (purposefully?) absent from Cohen’s project description.

Most notably, it is impossible for me to overlook the fact that sacrificial lambs play an important role in Judeo-Christian religion. Furthermore, John the Baptist referred to Jesus as the Lamb of God, whose sacrificial death washed away the sins of the world (John 1:29). Such imagery can be seen in one of the most famous pieces of European religious art: Jan van Eyck’s The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, or Ghent Altarpiece (1432), which depicts the sacrificial lamb surrounded by fourteen angels, and groups of male clergy, female martyrs, Jews and pagans.

More generally, lambs bound for sacrifice also appear in many Renaissance religious paintings and sculptures, such as Agnus Dei by Francisco de Zurbarán (1635-1640).

To conjure a lamb or sheep, then, as a cleansing machine is doubly powerful. Cohen’s images above show the sheep effectively bound by medical tubing instead of rope, but also bathed by soft light and lying in straw like so many lambs in nativity scenes. It may not be killed by the act of serving as a dialysis machine, but arguably its (quality of) life is still sacrificed; and while the lamb itself is not resurrected, another being effectively is.

Now maybe I’m reading too much into this, but I’m interested in how critical design can move people, or how it affects who we are and who we can become. Although this is more a matter of potential rather than actual engagement with design, I think it is related to the matter of audience, or whose potential we’re talking about. As Emily Dawson put it in her EASST 2010 paper, “Speculative design and the issue of public participation” (abstract, pdf):

“While some speculative design projects seek out alternatives platforms for engaging with diverse publics, for example workshops in community centres or with patient groups, there is a persistent tendency towards the exhibition as the central engagement format, often coupled with an online element. It is clear from decades of research in museums and galleries that exhibitions, both physical and online, are a fantastic way of preaching to the choir, and little else. Speculative design projects in this vein may not reach beyond an already interested audience of designers and scientists.”

As part of this already interested, and educated, audience I realise that my engagement with Cohen’s Dialysis Sheep is most likely atypical. Visiting an RCA Design Interactions degree show, or keeping up on art and design blogs, betrays my interests and education. In other words, as a researcher, I am part of a very narrow kind of public and I have no idea what other members of other publics would think of Cohen’s concept. For example, did the designer consider showing it to dialysis patients and their families? And what could be gained from such interactions?

Looking at the issues from another perspective, what can a movie like 2006′s Black Sheep do for public understanding and debate that Dialysis Sheep can’t?

One of the most fascinating things that has emerged from the first few months of Counting Sheep research is that designers and non-designers are responding to our designs quite differently. These differences in audience response have led me to seriously question my intention to hold an exhibition next year, and I find myself increasingly turning to diverse publics and means of interaction with our work. After all, if I’m seeking public engagement with the technosocial issues at hand then I need to be clearer on what kind of public(s) I’m talking about–and other researchers and designers simply aren’t it.

For example, the first set of videos we made on NZ merino wool turned out to be rather didactic exercises in digital storytelling that tend to fall flat with designers and researchers, but utterly captivate other people. It was this response that led me to make our Story of NZ Merino Wool content available for Mix & Mash: The Great NZ Remix and Mashup Competition and share it with public educators and NZ merino industry stakeholders, instead of just exhibiting it or writing about it in journal articles. In short, I wanted people other than the usual suspects to see our work, and I wanted it to be possible for other people to do something with it. There is nothing particularly critical about these videos, but they are helping us see what we can do with other people and allowing for the possibility that critique doesn’t only originate from research and design practice. Our Kotahitanga Urban Merino Farm is a clearer example of speculative design, and will hopefully offer further opportunities along these lines. For example, I’ll be taking the project to the 50th annual Merino Shearing and Wool Handling Championships next month to discuss with participants and attendees, and it’ll be interesting to see where that leads.

For now, I’m just trying to figure out who critical and speculative design is actually for. What do you think?