The view from the industry

As a change of pace at the end of a long and at times difficult day, we had a great talk from Steffi Friedrichs, Director of the Nanotechnology Industries Association, giving a forward look about where her members see the major application opportunities for nanotechnologies on a 10-15 year timescale, and how the outcome of this Ideas Factory could contribute to or drive forward these opportunities. The NIA is a relatively newly established organisation, based in the UK, with UK government support and encouragement, but including a number of major multinationals as well as smaller startups. All their members, though, are distinguished by the fact that they make, or are thinking of making, products, using nanotechnologies. Steffi was looking well ahead of current commercialised applications in nanomaterials, to possible functional devices and integrated systems with applications in areas such as energy, healthcare and medicine, particularly, in the latter area, the ideas of the combination of nanoscale sensors and point-of-delivery synthesis which are implicit in the increasingly fashionable area of theranostics.

New technology, old technology

Day 2, and we’re starting to sketch out ideas and directions. Loads of ideas and thoughts, but we’re still very much in the divergent phase.

The wireless link in this venue is so flakey that we’ve ended up printing out all 65 comments to the blog and sticking them to the wall.

Getting going…

Today the Ideas Factory got going in earnest. A group of scientists arrived this morning at a country house outside Southampton, which would feel delightfully rural if it wasn’t for grey skies and continuous rain. There’s no time to enjoy the surroundings, though – we’ve spent the day immersed in flip charts and post-it notes, beginning the process of getting to know each other, finding out what we each have to offer by way of expertise and other skills, and beginning to define the problem.

Some damp ideas factory participants outside the conference centre.

It all feels very chaotic at the moment, but I expect that the process of finding definition will start in the bar this evening.

Richard Jones

Is the view worth the climb?

Richard has asked for ideas about what we could do if we had a matter compiler. There has been a range of suggestions but, to my industrial eyes, too high a fraction of “you could do this piece of science”. Jack points out the confusion between science and technology. To paraphrase a wittier quote “research is turning money into ideas and technology is turning ideas into money”.

Although there is a fair amount of activity that parades under the nomenclature of nanotechnology, I suspect much is driven by the availability of funding or the desire not to be left out! Industry does what it can identify the output of – and output that has value to society or individuals. We are surely aiming at having the output of the ideas factory accessible to society? Is there another route?

There are also a lot of questions about whether we want short or long term goals. If we are to realise the full potential of the goal we are setting ourselves this week, we need to identify both short and long term goals but – and to my mind this is the crux of the question – we need to start with is the final paragraph of Jack’s last post “What things – methods, products, outcomes, social needs – should we be imagining? And what questions should we have in our minds as we do so?” We can then prioritise them in terms of effort required and resultant benefit and decide where best to focus our efforts – over time. In other words we first need to ask what CAN we do and then what WILL we do?

David Bott

We’ve only just begun

A lot of comments so far. And a fascinating discussion brewing on the outside before the factory workers have even cleared their throats. I won’t pretend to understand the intricacies. My brain already hurts. But it strikes me that we have some interesting lines of argument in place that touch upon the central questions of what the Ideas Factory is for and what science is for. Over on the Demos Greenhouse, a commenter has been a part of a previous Ideas Factory. He tells us that we were in for something special.

Suggestions so far, both in terms of making matter and running the sandpit, have ranged from the prosaic to the far-fetched. Some have commented that we should take stock and look for do-able problems (is science, like politics, the art of the possible?) Others have suggested that we use this as an opportunity to our disrupt disciplinary, and disciplined, sense of what is possible.

When Richard asked people to think of what we might use a matter compiler for, some replied that it could perform new scientific tricks. Others, including Zenith, our self-confessed hobbyist, wanted a fundamental change in the way he or she was able to create real things.

One final point before handing over. Lots of the conversation so far has hinged on the nano-question of how we can observe things without intervening. We can try to represent things, using microscopes or the computer models favoured by some of our more radical friends. But the challenge comes when we try to make things as we would like them – or coerce things into falling into place as we would wish. All of this blurs the distinction between science and technology. Is seeing believing, or do we need to intervene, which is more chaotic, for nano-things to make sense to us? And how much are the limits of possibility (or plausibility) defined by what we know?

Over the weekend, if people are able, we would love to see more discussion, which we will inject into the first day.

What things – methods, products, outcomes, social needs – should we be imagining? And what questions should we have in our minds as we do so?

Jack

What would you do with a matter compiler?

My thanks to everyone who has contributed to this blog so far. Here, I would like to ask people a more specific question that follows on from David Bott’s post below. If you had a “matter compiler” – some device or scheme that could arrange atoms or molecules according to an arbitrary, user-defined blueprint – what would you do with it? What new materials would you make, what new devices do you think it would make possible?

I’ve given some of my own thoughts about this on a post on my own blog – It’s all about metamaterials – but what do you think? In the spirit of Jeremy Baumberg’s comment below, it would be interesting to hear thoughts not only about what might be possible in the future, but what we might aspire to on a much closer timescale, given the sort of limited capability we might hope to achieve in a year or two.

Richard Jones

But what will it do?

Since we seem to be introducing ourselves, I guess it is my turn. By way of background, you can check out http://www.eotr-solutions.com/background.html. Richard has asked me to “say something” about where my interest in this area came from. Having worked in polymeric materials all of my professional career, I have spent lots of time trying to make systems and materials that do something that someone has value for. I think I have seen increased understanding of how structure – at all levels – determines functionality, but also come to realise that our ability to make things cost effectively and resource efficiently has lagged behind. I am not sure whether this is the right way to achieve this goal, but cannot see another option to explore at the moment!!

Put another way, for many years now, the materials industry has understood that customers don’t buy specific materials, or even single properties. They buy a combination of properties that satisfy the needs of their initial application. This desire to address a specific set of needs has led to a culture of “designed materials”. Of course, the precise link between requirements and materials and process selection are not as cut and dried as we wanted to believe, but nevertheless the goal of achieving this has been an important driver in linking theory, modelling and simulation, processing and testing. Part of this has been concerned with examining natural solutions to applications needs – and the huge interest in biomimetic structure and materials. There is an interesting distinction between slavish replication of biological materials, and the derivation of the underlying design rules and their application in alternative systems.

Now comes “software control of matter”. This potentially promises a means of applying the developing design rules. It also, by virtue of it implied action at the molecular and supramolecular, suggests that we can produce integrated materials which possess the required basket of properties that any specific applications demands. Again the parallel with nature applies. The DNA based route use by the nature we know is not necessarily the only way to go.

David Bott
The (pseudo) industrial Mentor
Software Control of Matter Ideas Factory

Way upstream

As Richard mentioned, I’ll be helping with the Ideas Factory and the blog. As a starter, I’ve just posted the following to the Demos blog… Next week, I will be a mentor at the EPSRC’s ‘Ideas Factory’ on Software Control of Matter. This takes me way upstream and puts me among a diverse group of scientists, who are coming together to consider how to approach an esoteric problem with potentially massive implications – building stuff nano-bit by nano-bit. The EPSRC, who distribute the engineering and physics part of the UK’s science budget, have set aside money to fund the proposals that are produced.

For the last year, we at Demos have been doing what we call ‘experiments in public engagement.’ We have been bringing together new groups of people to open up debates about the means and ends of nanotechnology research and development. The fascinating thing about the Ideas Factory for me is that it is an experiment in funding science, as well as being an experiment with a new form of conversation about science. Scientists, like any group, spend much of their time hanging out with, talking to, reading and reading about people with narrowly similar interested. What will happen when people are brought together from different disciplines, cultures, places and languages? Who knows? I can’t wait.

Jack Stilgoe
Ideas Factory Mentor

Software control of matter – your ideas welcome

One of the purposes of this public blog for the EPSRC Ideas Factory was to open up the process to anyone interested. When the sandpit begins, on January 8, we’ll be writing about the process as it happens. But we’d also be very interested in any ideas any readers of the blog might have. You might have an opinion about how we might achieve this goal in practise; you might have thoughts about what kinds of materials one might hope to make in this way; or you might have thoughts about why – for what social benefit, or economic gain – you might want to make these materials and devices.

All readers are invited to comment on the thoughts they might have through the comment facility on the Ideas Factory blog. Towards the end of next week, I’ll start putting up some posts asking for comments, and if we get any suggestions, we will feed the suggestions in to the participants of the Ideas Factory, using the blog to report back reactions. One of the mentors for the Ideas Factory – Jack Stilgoe, from the thinktank Demos – will collate and report the comments to the group. Jack’s a long-time observer of the nanotech scene, but he’s not a nanoscientist himself, so he won’t have any preconceptions of what might or might not work.

Richard Jones
Director

“If you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got.”

EPSRC SANDPIT – SOFTWARE CONTROL OF MATTER AT THE ATOMIC OR MOLECULAR SCALE

What is a Sandpit?
A sandpit is a residential interactive workshop over 5 days involving 20-30 participants, a director and a number of independent stakeholders. An essential element of a sandpit is a highly multidisciplinary mix of participants taking part to drive lateral thinking and radical approaches to addressing particular research challenges.

A sand-pit is an intensive discussion forum where free-thinking is encouraged to delve deep into the problems on the agenda in order to uncover innovative solutions. The sand-pit is led by the Director, whose role will be to define the topic and facilitate discussions at the sand-pit. This sand-pit will be led by Professor Richard Jones of the University of Sheffield. Working with the Director and participants will be a team of professional facilitators who will also help steer participants through the process.

The Challenge

Can we design and construct a device or scheme that can arrange atoms or molecules according to an arbitrary, user-defined blueprint?

This is at the heart of the idea of the software control of matter – the creation, perhaps, of a “matter compiler” which will interpret software instructions to output a macroscopic product in which every atom is precisely placed. Progress towards this goal would significantly open up the range of available functional materials, permitting meta-materials with interesting electronic, optoelectronic, optical and magnetic properties.

One route to this goal might be to take inspiration from 3-d rapid prototyping devices, and conceive of some kind of pick-and-place mechanism operating at the atomic or molecular level, perhaps based on scanning probe techniques. On the other hand, the field of DNA nanotechnology gives us examples of complex structures built by self-assembly, in which the program to guide the construction is implicit within the structure of the building blocks themselves. This problem, then, goes beyond surface chemistry and the physics of self-assembly to some fundamental questions in computer science.

The Outputs?

The sand pit will produce

Novelty in ideas
Novelty in methodology
Novelty in teams

Leading to new, fully funded, exciting research activities.

Paul Rouse
EPSRC