Probiotic Design Interventions for The Indoor Microbiome

The negative impact of contemporary built environments on human microbiome health has led researchers and designers to reconsider the way we shape our cities in relation to microbes. This has informed a shift from so-called antibiotic to probiotic thinking. Probiotic design integrates knowledge from microbiome science, architecture, and digital technologies to address the emerging health challenges of antimicrobial resistance (AMR) and immunoregulation. It develops methodologies for understanding, analyzing, and intervening the indoor microbiome to shape healthy and resilient buildings. Microbiome studies have shown how dry, nutrient poor surfaces in buildings drive microbes to exhibit resistance traits, and can remain active on indoor surfaces for extended periods, posing infection risks to occupants [Coughenour et al., 2011]. The NOTBAD project [Ramirez-Figueroa and Beckett, 2020] demonstrated that probiotic microbes integrated into bio-receptive ceramic materials can survive and outcompete harmful microbes under laboratory conditions. A key knowledge gap relates to understanding these agencies in real word built environments. Building on this concept, this study integrates computational design methods to facilitates the conceptualization of probiotic surface design interventions. It develops a probiotic ceramic tiling system whereby environmentally informed toolpaths, textures and geometrical articulations, act as niches to support probiotic microbial communities based on computational design.