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一切事物均被肉眼不可見的生態系統覆蓋,其組成為微小的生命形式:細菌、病毒和黴菌。我們的書桌、電腦、筆、建築全是微生物的棲息地,當我們設計這些物品時,不妨思考一下關於這些隱形世界的設計,同時思考它們如何與我們個人的生態系統互動。我們的身體是億萬個微生物的住所,這些生物定義了我們。腸道中的微生物可影響你的體重和心情;皮膚上的微生物有助於提升你的免疫系統;口中的微生物可使你口氣清新,或正好相反。最重要的是,我們個人的生態系統與我們接觸的一切生態系統間的交互作用。因此,例如,當你觸摸一支筆時,即發生微生物交換。如果我們能設計周遭的隱形生態系統,將開啟一條途徑,以前所未有的方式影響我們的健康。經常有人問我,「設計微生物生態系統是否確實可行?」我認為答案是肯定的;我認為我們此刻正在進行這件事,但處於不自覺狀態。我想與大家分享一些資訊,來自我對建築的研究之一,顯示我們如何藉由有意識及無意識的設計,影響這些肉眼不可見的世界。
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以下為系統擷取之英文原文
Everything is covered in invisible ecosystems made of tiny lifeforms: bacteria, viruses and fungi. Our desks, our computers, our pencils, our buildings all harbor resident microbial landscapes. As we design these things, we could be thinking about designing these invisible worlds, and also thinking about how they interact with our personal ecosystems.
Our bodies are home to trillions of microbes, and these creatures define who we are. The microbes in your gut can influence your weight and your moods. The microbes on your skin can help boost your immune system. The microbes in your mouth can freshen your breath, or not, and the key thing is that our personal ecosystems interact with ecosystems on everything we touch. So, for example, when you touch a pencil, microbial exchange happens.
If we can design the invisible ecosystems in our surroundings, this opens a path to influencing our health in unprecedented ways.
I get asked all of the time from people, "Is it possible to really design microbial ecosystems?" And I believe the answer is yes. I think we're doing it right now, but we're doing it unconsciously. I'm going to share data with you from one aspect of my research focused on architecture that demonstrates how, through both conscious and unconscious design, we're impacting these invisible worlds.
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這是奧勒岡大學Lillis商學綜合大樓,我與一個由建築師和生物學家組成的團隊合作,在這棟建築中300多個房間取樣。我們希望得到類似建築物化石紀錄的資料,為了達成這個目標,我們蒐集灰塵樣本。我們從灰塵中分離出細菌細胞,將它們打破,比較其中的基因序列,這意味著我的團隊成員在這個計畫中進行了許多吸塵工作。照片中的人是Tim,就在拍攝這張照片的當下,他提醒我-他說,「Jessica,在上個研究團隊中,我的工作是在哥斯大黎加雨林進行田野調查,對我來說,目前的處境簡直是天壤之別。」
因此我準備向大家展示我們在辦公室中的第一項發現。我們將藉由某種視覺工具瀏覽這些資料,這是我和Autodesk(3D軟體設計公司)長期合作的成果。瀏覽資料的方法是,先觀察圓圈外圍,你將看見許多不同的菌落。如果觀察這個粉紅葉片狀圖形,它將顯示每種菌落的相對數量,因此在12點鐘方向,你看見辦公室存在許多甲型變形菌;在1點鐘方向,你看見桿菌數量十分稀少。
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This is the Lillis Business Complex at the University of Oregon, and I worked with a team of architects and biologists to sample over 300 rooms in this building. We wanted to get something like a fossil record of the building, and to do this, we sampled dust. From the dust, we pulled out bacterial cells, broke them open, and compared their gene sequences. This means that people in my group were doing a lot of vacuuming during this project. This is a picture of Tim, who, right when I snapped this picture, reminded me, he said, "Jessica, the last lab group I worked in I was doing fieldwork in the Costa Rican rainforest, and things have changed dramatically for me."
So I'm going to show you now first what we found in the offices, and we're going to look at the data through a visualization tool that I've been working on in partnership with Autodesk. The way that you look at this data is, first, look around the outside of the circle. You'll see broad bacterial groups, and if you look at the shape of this pink lobe, it tells you something about the relative abundance of each group. So at 12 o'clock, you'll see that offices have a lot of alphaproteobacteria, and at one o'clock you'll see that bacilli are relatively rare.
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我們看看建築中不同類型空間的情況。如果觀察休息室,它們的生態系統均十分相似;如果觀察教室,它們亦擁有相似的生態系統;但如果縱觀這些空間類型,可看出它們彼此間截然不同。我喜歡將浴室想成熱帶雨林,我對Tim說,「如果你能看見微生物,感覺就像身處哥斯大黎加。多少吧!」我也喜歡將辦公室想成溫帶草原,這個觀點對設計師來說十分有用,因為你可套用生態學原則。生態學中一個十分重要的原則就是分佈,即有機體的傳播方式。我們知道微生物藉由人類和空氣傳播,因此我們希望在這棟建築中做的第一件事,就是觀察空氣系統。
機械工程師設計空調系統,確保人們感到舒適、空氣流通、氣溫恰到好處。他們利用物理和化學原理進行這項工作,但也可利用生物學。如果觀察這棟建築中某個空調系統裡的微生物,將發現其中生態均十分相似;如果將它與不同空調系統中的微生物比較,將發現兩者截然不同。這建築中的房間就像孤立群島中的島嶼,這意味著機械工程師如同生態工程師,有能力以他們想要的方式建構這棟建築中的生物群落。另一個傳播微生物的方式是藉由人類。設計師通常將房間設計在一處,促進人們的交流,或分享彼此的看法,就像實驗室和辦公室。考慮微生物隨著人們四處傳播,你或許預期相距不遠的房間存在相似的生物群落,這正是我們發現的結果。
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Let's take a look at what's going on in different space types in this building. If you look inside the restrooms, they all have really similar ecosystems, and if you were to look inside the classrooms, those also have similar ecosystems. But if you look across these space types, you can see that they're fundamentally different from one another. I like to think of bathrooms like a tropical rainforest. I told Tim, "If you could just see the microbes, it's kind of like being in Costa Rica. Kind of." And I also like to think of offices as being a temperate grassland.
This perspective is a really powerful one for designers, because you can bring on principles of ecology, and a really important principle of ecology is dispersal, the way organisms move around. We know that microbes are dispersed around by people and by air. So the very first thing we wanted to do in this building was look at the air system. Mechanical engineers design air handling units to make sure that people are comfortable, that the air flow and temperature is just right. They do this using principles of physics and chemistry, but they could also be using biology. If you look at the microbes in one of the air handling units in this building, you'll see that they're all very similar to one another. And if you compare this to the microbes in a different air handling unit, you'll see that they're fundamentally different. The rooms in this building are like islands in an archipelago, and what that means is that mechanical engineers are like eco-engineers, and they have the ability to structure biomes in this building the way that they want to.
Another facet of how microbes get around is by people, and designers often cluster rooms together to facilitate interactions among people, or the sharing of ideas, like in labs and in offices. Given that microbes travel around with people, you might expect to see rooms that are close together have really similar biomes. And that is exactly what we found.
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如果觀察彼此相鄰的教室,它們擁有十分相似的生態系統;但如果觀察與其相距甚遠的辦公室,其中的生態系統則大不相同。當我發現這些生物地理學分佈模式的力量,意識到或許可藉此解決一些充滿挑戰的問題,例如院內感染。我認為其中部分原因必定在於建築物的生態問題。好,我將告訴大家更多關於這棟建築的故事。我與Charlie Brown合作,他是一名建築師。Charlie十分關切全球氣候變化,畢生致力於永續建築設計,當他遇上我之後,意識到自己有機會以量化方式進行研究,瞭解他的設計選擇如何影響這棟建築的生態和生物系統。他十分興奮,因為這為他的工作增添一個新層面。他從僅思考能源問題,轉為同時將人類健康納入考量。他協助設計了一些這棟建築的空調系統及通風方式,因此我首先要展示的是我們從戶外取樣的空氣。圖中顯示的是戶外空氣中的細菌群落,以及它們如何隨時間改變。接下來我將向大家展示我們以教室進行實驗的情形。我們於夜間將它關閉,因此教室無法通風。許多建築採用這種方式,或許你的工作地點正是如此,公司藉由這種方式節省電費。我們發現這些房間的空氣幾乎靜止不動,直到我們周六再次將它打開。當你走進那些房間時,氣味十分難聞。我們的資料顯示,這和人們前一天於空氣中留下的菌落有關。相較於採用被動式永續策略設計的房間,戶外空氣可由百葉窗進入,這些房間的空氣成分與戶外空氣極為相似。目睹這個結果時,Charlie非常興奮,他感到自己在設計過程中做了一個好選擇,因為這不僅符合能源效率需求,也能帶走殘留在建築中的微生物。我剛剛展示的是關於建築的例子,但這和任何設計都息息相關。想像我們設計希望出現在飛機上或手機上的微生物種類。我不久前發現一種新型微生物,名為BLIS。研究證明,它不僅能抵禦病原體,也能使你口氣清新。如果我們手機上都有BLIS,不是很棒嗎?根據意識進行的設計,我稱之為生物資訊設計(bioinformed design),我認為這是可行的。謝謝。
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If you look at classrooms right adjacent to one another, they have very similar ecosystems, but if you go to an office that is a farther walking distance away, the ecosystem is fundamentally different. And when I see the power that dispersal has on these biogeographic patterns, it makes me think that it's possible to tackle really challenging problems, like hospital-acquired infections. I believe this has got to be, in part, a building ecology problem.
All right, I'm going to tell you one more story about this building. I am collaborating with Charlie Brown. He's an architect, and Charlie is deeply concerned about global climate change. He's dedicated his life to sustainable design. When he met me and realized that it was possible for him to study in a quantitative way how his design choices impacted the ecology and biology of this building, he got really excited, because it added a new dimension to what he did. He went from thinking just about energy to also starting to think about human health. He helped design some of the air handling systems in this building and the way it was ventilated.
So what I'm first going to show you is air that we sampled outside of the building. What you're looking at is a signature of bacterial communities in the outdoor air, and how they vary over time. Next I'm going to show you what happened when we experimentally manipulated classrooms. We blocked them off at night so that they got no ventilation. A lot of buildings are operated this way, probably where you work, and companies do this to save money on their energy bill. What we found is that these rooms remained relatively stagnant until Saturday, when we opened the vents up again. When you walked into those rooms, they smelled really bad, and our data suggests that it had something to do with leaving behind the airborne bacterial soup from people the day before. Contrast this to rooms that were designed using a sustainable passive design strategy where air came in from the outside through louvers. In these rooms, the air tracked the outdoor air relatively well, and when Charlie saw this, he got really excited. He felt like he had made a good choice with the design process because it was both energy efficient and it washed away the building's resident microbial landscape.
The examples that I just gave you are about architecture, but they're relevant to the design of anything. Imagine designing with the kinds of microbes that we want in a plane or on a phone.
There's a new microbe, I just discovered it. It's called BLIS, and it's been shown to both ward off pathogens and give you good breath. Wouldn't it be awesome if we all had BLIS on our phones?
A conscious approach to design, I'm calling it bioinformed design, and I think it's possible.
Thank you.