Frankensteining the Built Environment and the Internet of Occupants

Taking a look at this book, about the place where we all share 90% of our time, the great indoors. 

Image credit: Negative capacitance engineered crystals, Ella Maru Studio, University of California Berkeley, 2022 [link]

The Great Indoors: The Surprising Science of How Buildings Shape Our Behavior, Health and Happiness

Emily Anthes, Ferrar Straus and Giroux New York, 2020

This book is about how buildings shape our behavior, but I'd like to think about how we, as users in an increasingly omniscient complex of distributed sensors and datacrunchers, will become the driving force in shaping our buildings. 

A few loosely related ideas webbed between the indoor microbiome, the coming avalanche of chemical sensor technologies, and the never ending and insatiable appetite that humans have for more information, are all converging on a building that is designed, operated and improved by the Internet-of-Occupants. 

Fossil diatom Anthodiscina floreata - Michael Landgrebe for Nikon Small World Competition - 2021

Let's start with the reminder that our buildings are already alive -- they're filled with micro-organisms, which will one day be seen as legitimate occupants sharing our indoor space with us. (SARS-CoV-2 would like to have a word)

• Microbial Forensics: Researchers tracked 3 families as they moved into new homes; each family's distinct blend of microbes colonized its new residents within hours. (p16-17) *Note: the residents didn't colonize the house, the house colonized the residents.
• The bacteria come from us, the fungi from the building; a stone house feeds different fungi from a wooden house. "Because unlike the bacteria, they're eating the house." -Dunn (p18)
• New techniques for reading DNA, which we're all now familiar with (PCR) is what allows us to finally do surveys like this, along with shotgun genomics for sequencing all the organisms in a random sample [link] 
• They conducted the biggest indoor microbial survey ever, and here's what they found: "more than forty thousand species of fungi, a number larger than the number of named fungal species in North America. We have found more than eighty thousand kinds of bacteria. We have found more kinds of Archaea (once thought to be denizens exclusively of extreme environments such as hot springs and belly buttons) than were known from Earth just a decade ago. And there is more. We have not yet gotten to the insect legs (though Anne Madden is working on it). We are only beginning to consider the plants." [link]  
• The Universal Sample Location: "Participants were instructed to sample the upper door trim on an interior door in the main living area of the home and the upper door trim on the outside surface of an exterior door" because a it's a sampling location that is found in every home, is unlikely to be cleaned frequently, and serves as a passive collector of indoor and outdoor aerosols and dust with little to no direct contact from the home occupants [link] 
• Persistent Omniscient Surveillance: "The fungi on the outside of the house are a measure of where the house is and what is going on around it, so much so that if you give us a sample of dust from anywhere in the United States we can tell you where it came from within about 100 km. We can tell you based on the composition of fungal life."

This makes it hard to ignore the value of nothing more than dirt for conducting geographically precise forensics. Think about this -- the dirt on your shoe can now tell us where you were in the past few days. And that's today. Extrapolate that a few years. In 2030, I will be able to swab a doorknob and find out every person who touched it, and then one level deeper to every person those people touched that day. Fingerprints?? That's some 20th century sh** right there. Give me your belly button and I will tell you your entire life's history. (Except for the guy with the dust very specifically from Japan in his belly button, who had never been to Japan in his life.) [link] 

• And further: They can tell whether you have a dog in the house, and what the male to female ratio is, and the secret is out, men, your lack of personal hygiene is showing up in the data: "Skin- and fecal-associated taxa were relatively more abundant in homes with fewer women. This pattern is probably driven by differences between the skin biology (and perhaps to body size and hygiene practices) of men and women." [link] 

Sources and further reading:

• Continental-scale distributions of dust-associated bacteria and fungi. Barberan A, Ladau J, Leff JW, Pollard KS, Menninger HL, Dunn RR, and Fierer N. (2015) PNAS 112(18): 5756–5761. https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1420815112
• The Ecology of Microscopic Life in Household Dust. Barberán A, Dunn RR, Reich BJ, Pacifici K, Laber EB, Menninger HL, Morton JM, Henley JB, Leff JW, Miller SL, Fierer N (2015) Proc. R. Soc. B 282 20151139; DOI: 10.1098/rspb.2015.1139. https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2015.1139
• North Carolina State's Public Science Lab, "Wild Life of Our Homes" project in the Rob Dunn Lab, and with collaborator Noah Fierer via University of Colorado Boulder. http://robdunnlab.com/projects/wild-life-of-our-homes/
• The First National Inventory of All Household Life (on a swab), Wild Life of Our Homes blog, Aug 2015. http://yourwildlife.org/2015/08/the-first-national-inventory-of-all-household-life-on-a-swab/

"Inner Life of Network" - Hard time finding a source on this one.

Next, a reminder that the extent of the datastream coming from a building, today, is basically a thermometer in an HVAC duct. Sure there are occupant sensors for smart lights and CO2-based ventilation, but this is nothing compared to what can and hopefully will happen when we start using the small, cheap chemosensors being refined in labs today and tomorrow marketed to facilities managers, and maybe even the human resources department (and hopefully not federal and local authorities! just kidding Clearview).

• Montoring real-time environmental conditions inside: "Buildings are the last black boxes of the information age" -Marc Syp, architect (p99)

This guy is talking about thermal comfort like temperature and humidity. But I'm talking about microbiomes and biomarkers. Datalogging exhaled isoprene can tell you about rising levels of employee stress. Profiling microbiomes on door handles can give you some idea of different diseases floating around in the air. Monitoring sewage data can tell you how many of your staff members are taking drugs like amphetamines, caffeine, nicotine, anti-depressants, wow you name it. And the sensors won't have to be in the sewer, they can be deployed right on the fixtures. 

And why would you want to know all these things? Your imagination will have to take over from here. 

Breathing BioMetal Regulates Building Temperature - A Moonshot Project w Doris Kim Sung 2013

Finally, the end result of all this integration between occupant behavior and building design and operation looks like a building that really is alive. Nothing says "I'm alive" like a heaving hunk of Frankenbricks:

• The Breathing Building (Adaptive Buildings) matches your own breathing pattern, a tent-like structure "inhales and exhales" with you ... strong occupant reactions ... when the system shut off abruptly, one person felt a jolt in his chest. -Holger Schnadelbach and the Exo Building via Nottingham University (p178-179) [link]

Notes:

How indoor environmental quality affects occupants’ cognitive functions: A systematic review. Chao Wang, et al. Building and Environment, Volume 193, 2021, 107647, ISSN 0360-1323.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.buildenv.2021.107647