So we technophiles have our own ick factors to get over.

This is a little bit of a “curse the darkness” version of what you want to say, though. Do you have a purely “light a candle” version? A brochure or poster. Getting Started in MesoNanoTech! What the proteins are like, what the DNA connectors are like, how the connectors are put on the proteins, how complex are the structures that can self-assemble. How do you fish it out of the bath and get it to do something? What equipment and supplies do you need, who sells it, what labs already have the equipment, who’s actually doing it?

(from http://tinyurl.com/6h5ped )
During a break, Myhrvold announced that he had just bought a CAT scanner, on an Internet auction site.

“I put in a minimum bid of twenty-nine hundred dollars,” he said. There was much murmuring and nodding around the room. Myhrvold’s friends, like Myhrvold, seemed to be of the opinion that there is no downside to having a CAT scanner, especially if you can get it for twenty-nine hundred dollars.

Not all biologists are studiers rather than builders. I think to synthetic bio and diybio people, biology is just a prerequisite to getting your hands on stuff. While they think they want to use cells, I’ll bet some of them wouldn’t mind the finished product coming straight out of the sequence-building machine. Michelle Khine’s shrinky dink microfluidic technology isn’t nano but it’s definitely makerly.

They said “ick” when I started to meso ’round with mesonanotech.

A mixture of strategies might have advantages: Maintain a population of candidate partial solutions, and split the computational investment between using a novelty-seeking approach of the sort you describe (as a way to escape from local optima), while simultaneously using an objective-function based bias to focus more effort on looking for novelty around intermediate solutions that score better.

Tabu search is an effective but quite different method that explores regions away from the best currently known solution.