This seems to be the year that microbes will finally get the attention they “deserve” from designers. But the “Year of the Microbe” has been in the making for some time.
In 2010, in a Places article (“Viral Cities”), Thomas Fisher discussed urban planning, design and the possibility of disease epidemics. Among his most interesting points: “it [effective design] may involve our paying more attention to those elements of buildings – door knobs, light switches, restroom faucets and the like – that we now know are points of contact for transmitting disease. Here, too, both old customs and high tech are relevant. Hand shaking used to be a sign of solidarity among members of the same (viral) community – something we would do well to remember when we greet strangers. And motion detection and remote sensing technology — now often viewed as a convenience — may become necessities as we seek ways of operating the designed environment without coming in physical contact with it.”
At NeoCon this year, Jessica Green, who is co-director of the Biology and the Built Environment Center at the University of Oregon (https://biobe.uoregon.edu), delivered one of the keynote addresses, focusing on microbes, but in a different way than Fisher did. Her session was described in this way at the NeoCon website: “How can we create sustainable cities and healthier buildings – including classrooms, hospitals, offices and homes – by studying microbes? TED Senior Fellow Jessica Green explains how [in a talk] that charts the frontier of bio-inspired design…Green is helping us see how the microbial blueprint of our bodies, homes, cities and forests impacts our world, and our future…Green is currently spearheading efforts to model urban spaces as complex ecosystems that house trillions of diverse microorganisms interacting with each other, with humans, and with their environment…she is working with architects and engineers to advance our understanding of how microbial communities assemble, interact, evolve and influence public health.”
Articles sited on the papers section of the BIOBE Center’s website address topics from hand washing to indoor dust to green spaces, for starters.
A link on the BioBE Center website leads to a 2014 article in PLoS One by Kembel, Meadow, O’Connor, Mhuireach, Northcutt, Kline, Moriyama, Brown, Bohannan and Green (“Architectural Design Drives the Biogeography of Indoor Bacterial Communities”) which reports that “Architectural design has the potential to influence the microbiology of the built environment, with implications for human health and wellbeing…[data collected in a classroom and office building indicated that] Architectural design characteristics related to space type, building arrangement, human use and movement, and ventilation source had a large influence on the structure of bacterial communities…humans have a guiding impact on the microbial biodiversity in buildings, both indirectly through the effects of architectural design on microbial community structure, and more directly through the effects of human occupancy and use patterns on the microbes found in different spaces and space types. The impact of design decisions in structuring the indoor microbiome offers the possibility to use ecological knowledge to shape our buildings in a way that will select for an indoor microbiome that promotes our health and wellbeing.”
The growth of bio-inspired design heralds increased interest in the parts of our physical environment that we can’t see with the naked eye. That focus has important implications for the building forms that have filled our visual fields for thousands of human generations.
Sally Augustin, PhD, a cognitive scientist, is the editor of Research Design Connections can be reached at sallyaugustin@designwithscience.com.