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