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Everything is covered in invisible ecosystems

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made of tiny lifeforms: bacteria, viruses and fungi.

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Our desks, our computers, our pencils, our buildings

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all harbor resident microbial landscapes.

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As we design these things, we could be thinking

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about designing these invisible worlds,

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and also thinking about how they interact

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with our personal ecosystems.

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Our bodies are home to trillions of microbes,

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and these creatures define who we are.

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The microbes in your gut can influence your weight and your moods.

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The microbes on your skin can help boost your immune system.

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The microbes in your mouth can freshen your breath,

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or not,

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and the key thing is that our personal ecosystems

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interact with ecosystems on everything we touch.

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So, for example, when you touch a pencil,

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microbial exchange happens.

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If we can design the invisible ecosystems in our surroundings,

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this opens a path to influencing

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our health in unprecedented ways.

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I get asked all of the time from people,

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"Is it possible to really design microbial ecosystems?"

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And I believe the answer is yes.

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I think we're doing it right now,

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but we're doing it unconsciously.

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I'm going to share data with you

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from one aspect of my research focused on architecture

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that demonstrates how, through both conscious

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and unconscious design,

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we're impacting these invisible worlds.

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This is the Lillis Business Complex at the University of Oregon,

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and I worked with a team of architects and biologists

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to sample over 300 rooms in this building.

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We wanted to get something like a fossil record of the building,

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and to do this, we sampled dust.

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From the dust, we pulled out bacterial cells,

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broke them open, and compared their gene sequences.

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This means that people in my group

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were doing a lot of vacuuming during this project.

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This is a picture of Tim, who,

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right when I snapped this picture, reminded me,

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he said, "Jessica, the last lab group I worked in

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I was doing fieldwork in the Costa Rican rainforest,

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and things have changed dramatically for me."

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So I'm going to show you now first what we found in the offices,

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and we're going to look at the data through a visualization tool

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that I've been working on in partnership with Autodesk.

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The way that you look at this data is,

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first, look around the outside of the circle.

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You'll see broad bacterial groups,

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and if you look at the shape of this pink lobe,

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it tells you something about the relative abundance of each group.

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So at 12 o'clock, you'll see that offices have a lot of

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alphaproteobacteria, and at one o'clock

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you'll see that bacilli are relatively rare.

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Let's take a look at what's going on in different space types in this building.

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If you look inside the restrooms,

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they all have really similar ecosystems,

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and if you were to look inside the classrooms,

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those also have similar ecosystems.

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But if you look across these space types,

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you can see that they're fundamentally different

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from one another.

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I like to think of bathrooms like a tropical rainforest.

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I told Tim, "If you could just see the microbes,

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it's kind of like being in Costa Rica. Kind of."

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And I also like to think of offices as being a temperate grassland.

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This perspective is a really powerful one for designers,

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because you can bring on principles of ecology,

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and a really important principle of ecology is dispersal,

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the way organisms move around.

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We know that microbes are dispersed around by people

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and by air.

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So the very first thing we wanted to do in this building

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was look at the air system.

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Mechanical engineers design air handling units

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to make sure that people are comfortable,

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that the air flow and temperature is just right.

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They do this using principles of physics and chemistry,

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but they could also be using biology.

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If you look at the microbes

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in one of the air handling units in this building,

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you'll see that they're all very similar to one another.

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And if you compare this to the microbes

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in a different air handling unit,

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you'll see that they're fundamentally different.

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The rooms in this building are like islands in an archipelago,

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and what that means is that mechanical engineers

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are like eco-engineers, and they have the ability

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to structure biomes in this building the way that they want to.

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Another facet of how microbes get around is by people,

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and designers often cluster rooms together

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to facilitate interactions among people,

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or the sharing of ideas, like in labs and in offices.

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Given that microbes travel around with people,

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you might expect to see rooms that are close together

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have really similar biomes.

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And that is exactly what we found.

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If you look at classrooms right adjacent to one another,

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they have very similar ecosystems,

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but if you go to an office

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that is a farther walking distance away,

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the ecosystem is fundamentally different.

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And when I see the power that dispersal has

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on these biogeographic patterns,

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it makes me think that it's possible

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to tackle really challenging problems,

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like hospital-acquired infections.

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I believe this has got to be, in part,

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a building ecology problem.

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All right, I'm going to tell you one more story about this building.

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I am collaborating with Charlie Brown.

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He's an architect,

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and Charlie is deeply concerned about global climate change.

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He's dedicated his life to sustainable design.

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When he met me and realized that it was possible for him

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to study in a quantitative way

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how his design choices impacted

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the ecology and biology of this building,

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he got really excited, because it added a new dimension to what he did.

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He went from thinking just about energy

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to also starting to think about human health.

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He helped design some of the air handling systems

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in this building and the way it was ventilated.

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So what I'm first going to show you is

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air that we sampled outside of the building.

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What you're looking at is a signature of bacterial communities

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in the outdoor air, and how they vary over time.

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Next I'm going to show you what happened

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when we experimentally manipulated classrooms.

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We blocked them off at night

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so that they got no ventilation.

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A lot of buildings are operated this way,

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probably where you work,

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and companies do this to save money on their energy bill.

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What we found is that these rooms remained relatively stagnant

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until Saturday, when we opened the vents up again.

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When you walked into those rooms,

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they smelled really bad,

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and our data suggests that it had something to do with

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leaving behind the airborne bacterial soup

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from people the day before.

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Contrast this to rooms

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that were designed using a sustainable passive design strategy

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where air came in from the outside through louvers.

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In these rooms, the air tracked the outdoor air relatively well,

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and when Charlie saw this, he got really excited.

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He felt like he had made a good choice

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with the design process

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because it was both energy efficient

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and it washed away the building's resident microbial landscape.

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The examples that I just gave you are about architecture,

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but they're relevant to the design of anything.

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Imagine designing with the kinds of microbes that we want

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in a plane

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or on a phone.

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There's a new microbe, I just discovered it.

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It's called BLIS, and it's been shown

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to both ward off pathogens

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and give you good breath.

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Wouldn't it be awesome if we all had BLIS on our phones?

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A conscious approach to design,

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I'm calling it bioinformed design,

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and I think it's possible.

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Thank you.

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(Applause)