A design proposal from a speaker at this year's Picnic festival. Synthetic E.chromi bacteria changes colour when it detects disease in your poo.

The Picnic Festival is now on at the WesterGasfabriek bringing together creative and business leaders to work together on finding innovative answers to some of the worlds biggest questions.

Running till 24th September, this year's Picnic theme 'Redesign The World' focuses on four distinct areas: Life, City, Design and Media with speakers from a range of backgrounds including Matt Stinchcomb of Etsy.com, Charles Leadbeater and Adam Greenfield.

One particularly interesting event of the program will be The Reconnaissance Session Masterclass as part of the Designers & Artists 4 Genomics Award. This Pecha Kucha style event, run by the WAAG Society, is offering a 25,000Euro award to stimulate emerging designers and artists within the bio-arts in the Netherlands to develop and realise new projects.

To kick off the afternoon, artist and designer Alexander Daisy Ginsberg will be giving a masterclass presentation about various projects that explore the relationships between art, design and life sciences. Projects include E.Chromi which looks at design proposals based on pigment-producing E. coli bacteria, and Synthetic Aesthetics an initiative to bring synthetic biologists, designers, artists and social scientists together to explore synthetic biology, art and design. To read more about Daisy's Synthetic Aesthetics project see our earlier post

Other events to look out for include Urban Lenses Lab with Anab Jain from Superflux and Usman Haque and the Design for Our Future Self FabLab.