The holobiont, a term popularized by Lynn Margullis in the ‘70s, encompasses the notion of host and symbiont to redefine the notion of the ‘individual’. The boundary of the self becomes porous to include the complex relationships between a host organism and its associated microbiome, including bacteria, fungi, viruses, and other microorganisms.
Those microbes are an integral part of, and are affected by, our environment. As such, the individual microbiome—whether it lives on the skin, gut, mouth or elsewhere—manifests the continuum between organism and environment. It is a powerful tool for studying the impact of the environment on humans, and ultimately a vector with which to intervene through engineered landscapes.
Questions we are exploring in this topic are:
How can we design for the human holobiont?
What are the metrics we need to establish in urban environments for more-than-human design?
What are the implications and responsibilities?
| Title | Type | Venue | Date | People | Topics | Projects | Link |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Conference PresentationExhibitLLIAward | 2023 BioDesign Challenge, Museum of Modern Art, NYC | June 22, 2023 → June 23, 2023 | Sheila Atieno Diedre Brown Tori Coleman Ands Sanchez Anshika Srivastava | Holobiont Interactions Microbiomes and the Anthropocene Biological Metrics and Design | |||
Conference Presentation | 52nd International Conference on Urban Affairs, New York, NY | April 25, 2024 | Diedre Brown Progga Nabiha Bhuiyan Harry Trethowan Tori Coleman Elizabeth Hénaff | Holobiont Interactions, Resilient Cities | |||
Invited Article | Nature Microbiology | 2023-03-30 | |||||
Publication | Research Directions: Biotechnology Design, 2024, 1–38 | April 21, 2024 | |||||
Energy and Buildings 260, 111913 (2022) | 2022-04-01 | ||||||
Conference Presentation | Civic Art Lab, NYC | 2023-10-28 | Elizabeth Hénaff Heather Parrish, Leonard Roussel, Seth Wenger | ||||
Conference Presentation | 8th Annual Urban Soils Symposium – Metabolism of Cities ,The Arts Center at Governor’s Island | December 12, 2023 | Diedre Brown Harry Trethowan Progga Nabiha Bhuiyan Tori Coleman |
