A book chapter discussing the design artefact Neuroscope produced for Material Beliefs, a two-year research project, based at the Interaction Research Studio in the Department of Design at Goldsmiths, University of London, and funded by EPSRC.

As a Design Researcher working on the Material Beliefs project, I collaborated with Professor Kevin Warwick and his research team (Cybernetics and School of Pharmacy, Reading University). As a result of our collaboration, we developed and designed an interactive toy called Neuroscope, which situated research from Reading University in an everyday product, provoking questions about linking objects in the home to material in the laboratory.

Neuroscope provided a digital interface for a user to interact with a culture of brain cells, which are cared for in a laboratory. As the virtual cells are 'touched', an electrical signal is sent to the actual neurons in the laboratory. The cells then respond with changes in activity that may result in the formation of new connections. The user experienced this visually in real time, enabling interaction between the user and cell culture as part of a closed loop of interaction through the Neuroscope. The working prototype exemplified one possible future relationship with an emergent class of entities or living assemblages that can be categorized neither as an organism nor as object – a hybrid, to use Bruno Latour’s term.