Digital ‘faces’ of synthetic biology

• Computer-aided design software is an epistemological modality with its own means.
• Software bridges and black boxes the experimental challenges in synthetic biology.
• Graphical interfaces enable experimenters to visually program new organisms.
• Human-amendable diagrammatic surfaces cover and mirror algorithmic processes.
• Machine-readable subfaces foster efforts of model standardization and distribution.

In silicio design plays a fundamental role in the endeavour to synthesise biological systems. In particular, computer-aided design software enables users to manage the complexity of biological entities that is connected to their construction and reconfiguration. The software’s graphical user interface bridges the gap between the machine-readable data on the algorithmic subface of the computer and its human-amenable surface represented by standardised diagrammatic elements. Notations like the Systems Biology Graphical Notation (SBGN), together with interactive operations such as drag & drop, allow the user to visually design and simulate synthetic systems as ‘bio-algorithmic signs’. Finally, the digital programming process should be extended to the wet lab to manufacture the designed synthetic biological systems. By exploring the different ‘faces’ of synthetic biology, I argue that in particular computer-aided design (CAD) is pushing the idea to automatically produce de novo objects. Multifaceted software processes serve mutually aesthetic, epistemic and performative purposes by simultaneously black-boxing and bridging different data sources, experimental operations and community-wide standards. So far, synthetic biology is mainly a product of digital media technologies that structurally mimic the epistemological challenge to take both qualitative as well as quantitative aspects of biological systems into account in order to understand and produce new and functional entities.