0:00:01.387,0:00:05.106 Everything is covered in invisible ecosystems 0:00:05.106,0:00:09.594 made of tiny lifeforms: bacteria, viruses and fungi. 0:00:09.594,0:00:13.698 Our desks, our computers, our pencils, our buildings 0:00:13.698,0:00:17.154 all harbor resident microbial landscapes. 0:00:17.154,0:00:19.914 As we design these things, we could be thinking 0:00:19.914,0:00:22.728 about designing these invisible worlds, 0:00:22.728,0:00:24.971 and also thinking about how they interact 0:00:24.971,0:00:27.727 with our personal ecosystems. 0:00:27.727,0:00:31.370 Our bodies are home to trillions of microbes, 0:00:31.370,0:00:33.730 and these creatures define who we are. 0:00:33.730,0:00:37.608 The microbes in your gut can influence your weight and your moods. 0:00:37.608,0:00:41.066 The microbes on your skin can help boost your immune system. 0:00:41.066,0:00:44.075 The microbes in your mouth can freshen your breath, 0:00:44.075,0:00:45.547 or not, 0:00:45.547,0:00:48.526 and the key thing is that our personal ecosystems 0:00:48.526,0:00:51.594 interact with ecosystems on everything we touch. 0:00:51.594,0:00:53.186 So, for example, when you touch a pencil, 0:00:53.186,0:00:56.018 microbial exchange happens. 0:00:56.018,0:01:00.914 If we can design the invisible ecosystems in our surroundings, 0:01:00.914,0:01:03.537 this opens a path to influencing 0:01:03.537,0:01:06.928 our health in unprecedented ways. 0:01:06.928,0:01:09.392 I get asked all of the time from people, 0:01:09.392,0:01:13.462 "Is it possible to really design microbial ecosystems?" 0:01:13.462,0:01:16.010 And I believe the answer is yes. 0:01:16.010,0:01:17.935 I think we're doing it right now, 0:01:17.935,0:01:21.043 but we're doing it unconsciously. 0:01:21.043,0:01:23.008 I'm going to share data with you 0:01:23.008,0:01:26.736 from one aspect of my research focused on architecture 0:01:26.736,0:01:29.862 that demonstrates how, through both conscious 0:01:29.862,0:01:32.072 and unconscious design, 0:01:32.072,0:01:35.081 we're impacting these invisible worlds. 0:01:35.081,0:01:39.310 This is the Lillis Business Complex at the University of Oregon, 0:01:39.310,0:01:41.994 and I worked with a team of architects and biologists 0:01:41.994,0:01:46.168 to sample over 300 rooms in this building. 0:01:46.168,0:01:50.178 We wanted to get something like a fossil record of the building, 0:01:50.178,0:01:53.488 and to do this, we sampled dust. 0:01:53.488,0:01:57.396 From the dust, we pulled out bacterial cells, 0:01:57.396,0:02:00.800 broke them open, and compared their gene sequences. 0:02:00.800,0:02:02.527 This means that people in my group 0:02:02.527,0:02:05.840 were doing a lot of vacuuming during this project. 0:02:05.840,0:02:08.360 This is a picture of Tim, who, 0:02:08.360,0:02:10.814 right when I snapped this picture, reminded me, 0:02:10.814,0:02:13.384 he said, "Jessica, the last lab group I worked in 0:02:13.384,0:02:16.355 I was doing fieldwork in the Costa Rican rainforest, 0:02:16.355,0:02:20.112 and things have changed dramatically for me." 0:02:20.112,0:02:23.864 So I'm going to show you now first what we found in the offices, 0:02:23.864,0:02:26.940 and we're going to look at the data through a visualization tool 0:02:26.940,0:02:30.480 that I've been working on in partnership with Autodesk. 0:02:30.480,0:02:32.952 The way that you look at this data is, 0:02:32.952,0:02:36.530 first, look around the outside of the circle. 0:02:36.530,0:02:39.552 You'll see broad bacterial groups, 0:02:39.552,0:02:42.392 and if you look at the shape of this pink lobe, 0:02:42.392,0:02:45.408 it tells you something about the relative abundance of each group. 0:02:45.408,0:02:47.904 So at 12 o'clock, you'll see that offices have a lot of 0:02:47.904,0:02:50.465 alphaproteobacteria, and at one o'clock 0:02:50.465,0:02:54.660 you'll see that bacilli are relatively rare. 0:02:54.660,0:02:59.023 Let's take a look at what's going on in different space types in this building. 0:02:59.023,0:03:01.045 If you look inside the restrooms, 0:03:01.045,0:03:04.175 they all have really similar ecosystems, 0:03:04.175,0:03:06.503 and if you were to look inside the classrooms, 0:03:06.503,0:03:09.369 those also have similar ecosystems. 0:03:09.369,0:03:11.783 But if you look across these space types, 0:03:11.783,0:03:14.180 you can see that they're fundamentally different 0:03:14.180,0:03:16.335 from one another. 0:03:16.335,0:03:19.328 I like to think of bathrooms like a tropical rainforest. 0:03:19.328,0:03:21.815 I told Tim, "If you could just see the microbes, 0:03:21.815,0:03:25.854 it's kind of like being in Costa Rica. Kind of." 0:03:25.854,0:03:30.377 And I also like to think of offices as being a temperate grassland. 0:03:30.377,0:03:34.589 This perspective is a really powerful one for designers, 0:03:34.589,0:03:38.016 because you can bring on principles of ecology, 0:03:38.016,0:03:40.928 and a really important principle of ecology is dispersal, 0:03:40.928,0:03:43.655 the way organisms move around. 0:03:43.655,0:03:47.839 We know that microbes are dispersed around by people 0:03:47.839,0:03:48.910 and by air. 0:03:48.910,0:03:51.747 So the very first thing we wanted to do in this building 0:03:51.747,0:03:53.600 was look at the air system. 0:03:53.600,0:03:56.832 Mechanical engineers design air handling units 0:03:56.832,0:03:59.024 to make sure that people are comfortable, 0:03:59.024,0:04:01.577 that the air flow and temperature is just right. 0:04:01.577,0:04:05.121 They do this using principles of physics and chemistry, 0:04:05.121,0:04:09.495 but they could also be using biology. 0:04:09.495,0:04:11.607 If you look at the microbes 0:04:11.607,0:04:14.657 in one of the air handling units in this building, 0:04:14.657,0:04:18.648 you'll see that they're all very similar to one another. 0:04:18.648,0:04:22.183 And if you compare this to the microbes 0:04:22.183,0:04:24.327 in a different air handling unit, 0:04:24.327,0:04:27.039 you'll see that they're fundamentally different. 0:04:27.039,0:04:30.590 The rooms in this building are like islands in an archipelago, 0:04:30.590,0:04:33.447 and what that means is that mechanical engineers 0:04:33.447,0:04:36.123 are like eco-engineers, and they have the ability 0:04:36.123,0:04:41.707 to structure biomes in this building the way that they want to. 0:04:41.707,0:04:45.815 Another facet of how microbes get around is by people, 0:04:45.815,0:04:48.982 and designers often cluster rooms together 0:04:48.982,0:04:51.037 to facilitate interactions among people, 0:04:51.037,0:04:54.509 or the sharing of ideas, like in labs and in offices. 0:04:54.509,0:04:57.183 Given that microbes travel around with people, 0:04:57.183,0:04:59.856 you might expect to see rooms that are close together 0:04:59.856,0:05:02.111 have really similar biomes. 0:05:02.111,0:05:04.591 And that is exactly what we found. 0:05:04.591,0:05:07.758 If you look at classrooms right adjacent to one another, 0:05:07.758,0:05:09.957 they have very similar ecosystems, 0:05:09.957,0:05:13.096 but if you go to an office 0:05:13.096,0:05:16.144 that is a farther walking distance away, 0:05:16.144,0:05:18.880 the ecosystem is fundamentally different. 0:05:18.880,0:05:23.425 And when I see the power that dispersal has 0:05:23.425,0:05:25.705 on these biogeographic patterns, 0:05:25.705,0:05:28.264 it makes me think that it's possible 0:05:28.264,0:05:32.000 to tackle really challenging problems, 0:05:32.000,0:05:34.461 like hospital-acquired infections. 0:05:34.461,0:05:37.067 I believe this has got to be, in part, 0:05:37.067,0:05:40.710 a building ecology problem. 0:05:40.710,0:05:44.502 All right, I'm going to tell you one more story about this building. 0:05:44.502,0:05:47.967 I am collaborating with Charlie Brown. 0:05:47.967,0:05:49.508 He's an architect, 0:05:49.508,0:05:54.841 and Charlie is deeply concerned about global climate change. 0:05:54.841,0:05:57.785 He's dedicated his life to sustainable design. 0:05:57.785,0:06:00.881 When he met me and realized that it was possible for him 0:06:00.881,0:06:03.057 to study in a quantitative way 0:06:03.057,0:06:05.633 how his design choices impacted 0:06:05.633,0:06:08.593 the ecology and biology of this building, 0:06:08.593,0:06:13.102 he got really excited, because it added a new dimension to what he did. 0:06:13.102,0:06:14.970 He went from thinking just about energy 0:06:14.970,0:06:18.458 to also starting to think about human health. 0:06:18.458,0:06:22.319 He helped design some of the air handling systems 0:06:22.319,0:06:24.513 in this building and the way it was ventilated. 0:06:24.513,0:06:27.235 So what I'm first going to show you is 0:06:27.235,0:06:30.794 air that we sampled outside of the building. 0:06:30.794,0:06:34.961 What you're looking at is a signature of bacterial communities 0:06:34.961,0:06:38.937 in the outdoor air, and how they vary over time. 0:06:38.937,0:06:41.925 Next I'm going to show you what happened 0:06:41.925,0:06:45.574 when we experimentally manipulated classrooms. 0:06:45.574,0:06:47.189 We blocked them off at night 0:06:47.189,0:06:49.455 so that they got no ventilation. 0:06:49.455,0:06:51.632 A lot of buildings are operated this way, 0:06:51.632,0:06:53.383 probably where you work, 0:06:53.383,0:06:56.354 and companies do this to save money on their energy bill. 0:06:56.354,0:07:00.281 What we found is that these rooms remained relatively stagnant 0:07:00.281,0:07:03.340 until Saturday, when we opened the vents up again. 0:07:03.340,0:07:04.922 When you walked into those rooms, 0:07:04.922,0:07:06.897 they smelled really bad, 0:07:06.897,0:07:09.999 and our data suggests that it had something to do with 0:07:09.999,0:07:13.066 leaving behind the airborne bacterial soup 0:07:13.066,0:07:15.745 from people the day before. 0:07:15.745,0:07:17.917 Contrast this to rooms 0:07:17.917,0:07:22.198 that were designed using a sustainable passive design strategy 0:07:22.198,0:07:25.978 where air came in from the outside through louvers. 0:07:25.978,0:07:30.775 In these rooms, the air tracked the outdoor air relatively well, 0:07:30.775,0:07:32.910 and when Charlie saw this, he got really excited. 0:07:32.910,0:07:35.021 He felt like he had made a good choice 0:07:35.021,0:07:36.755 with the design process 0:07:36.755,0:07:39.150 because it was both energy efficient 0:07:39.150,0:07:44.439 and it washed away the building's resident microbial landscape. 0:07:44.439,0:07:47.481 The examples that I just gave you are about architecture, 0:07:47.481,0:07:49.994 but they're relevant to the design of anything. 0:07:49.994,0:07:54.164 Imagine designing with the kinds of microbes that we want 0:07:54.164,0:07:55.582 in a plane 0:07:55.582,0:07:58.515 or on a phone. 0:07:58.515,0:08:00.969 There's a new microbe, I just discovered it. 0:08:00.969,0:08:03.849 It's called BLIS, and it's been shown 0:08:03.849,0:08:06.033 to both ward off pathogens 0:08:06.033,0:08:08.178 and give you good breath. 0:08:08.178,0:08:14.197 Wouldn't it be awesome if we all had BLIS on our phones? 0:08:14.197,0:08:16.567 A conscious approach to design, 0:08:16.567,0:08:19.448 I'm calling it bioinformed design, 0:08:19.448,0:08:20.934 and I think it's possible. 0:08:20.934,0:08:22.372 Thank you. 0:08:22.372,0:08:26.125 (Applause)