Mimulus

A digital file is a string of 0s and 1s, which can be translated into DNA’s four letters (A, C, G, and T) and manufactured as synthetic strands. In the proposed service, dried and sealed DNA would sit on a credit-card-sized cartridge for decades without electricity, using a matching DNA “key” to copy back only the file you want.

I designed the catalog and workflow connecting file encoding, synthesis orders, card wells, and recovery—pairing an external database for everyday lookups with identifying records written into the DNA itself so an archive could still be recovered if the database were lost, while keeping the readers at Mimulus across staged card generations so customers never needed lab equipment.

While hardware work was underway with partners, I built three connected software tools with AI coding agents: an interactive cost story built for archive executives rather than spreadsheet analysts, a browser demonstration that genuinely encodes and recovers uploaded files bit for bit across three audience depth levels (while simulating the physical lab steps), and a rebuilt company website. Treating the demonstration as our living system reference also exposed places where written documents or card assumptions disagreed—including catching a drifted redundancy figure before an investor meeting.