BioLand is a research project investigating a critical design approach to bioethics.

BioLand is a fusion of department store (consumer landscape), laboratory (technology), and clinic (interface). A place to meet all our birth, death and marriage-related needs in a genetically modified world. GM Love is the thread that links all these products and services together. Love between two people, love for a child, loss of a loved one. It's a sort of existential shopping centre focusing on deeply human needs and how biotechnology will impact on the ways these needs are met and understood.

It is a thematic container for organising and understanding existing and potential bioproducts, services and projects. It is important that these products and services represent both negative and positive implications, their purpose is to stimulate discussion rather than be taken up for manufacture. BioLand is also a conceptual platform from which different kinds of collaborations and projects can develop and finally, it is a narrative device for engaging different audiences (experts, academics, industrialists, designers and the public).

BioLand allows us to locate design proposals within a complex mix of social, cultural, commercial and ethical contexts. It helps us to move away from a purely abstract and philosophical space into one of everyday consumerism and industrialisation. Most importantly, it is a tool for provoking debate about different biofutures. BioLand products and services are a mixture of existing and imaginary products. Some are produced by companies, while others exist only as proposals by artists, students and designers.

BioLand has four levels.

• The laboratories, situated underground, are where the products are developed and biomaterial is stored and processed. The labs include an outdoor space for breeding animals and growing plants.

• The consumer landscape is divided into six main thematic departments (IVF Land, BioBank/Utility Pets/Clonetopia, Immortality Inc., ForEverAfter, GM Love and Future Perfect) which link, fuse and confuse usually separate areas of technology, desire and products ? a place to display, buy and even test out GM products and services.

• At the heart of BioLand is a clinic, linking the worlds of consumerism and technology. It provides a support layer of handlers and behind-the-scenes facilities. It collects biomaterial deposits such as sperm and DNA from the various shops or retail units and distributes them to the appropriate lab, and eventually back to the shop.

• The final layer consists of the products and services themselves.

Thanks to Jan Abrams, Tom Fisher, Alex Stetter, Richard Ashcroft, Kyla Elliot, and the students and staff of platform 3 (Design Products) and Interaction Design at the Royal College of Art, London.

BioLand currently exists as an unpublished booklet.

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