'll be honest with you — when I first stumbled across Rachel Armstrong's papers, I genuinely thought I had the wrong person. The work was filed under architecture, but it was talking about chemistry, microbes, the origins of life, and the philosophy of matter.

Rachel Armstrong is a professor at KU Leuven's Faculty of Architecture, but she trained as a medical doctor at Oxford and Cambridge, spent time working in a leprosy colony in India, accidentally ended up in an artist's kitchen in London looking at sculptures made from frozen urine in the snow, and somehow arrived at one of the most fascinating and urgent ideas I've come across in a long time: that the way we build our cities and homes is based on a fundamentally broken relationship with matter itself. We get into what it would look like to build homes that behave more like coral reefs than concrete boxes, microbial fuel cells, living bricks, why a project to save Venice using self-mineralising chemical droplets might be the most poetic engineering proposal I've ever heard, and why Rachel is taking these ideas to communities in Uganda rather than waiting for Silicon Valley to catch up.

This one genuinely shifted something in the way I think about buildings, biology, and what science is even supposed to be doing right now. I hope it does the same for you

Takeaways:

• The episode features Dr. Rachel Armstrong, an architect with a medical background, who discusses her unique journey.
• Dr. Armstrong emphasizes the importance of questioning established norms with the phrase 'What if?' to inspire innovation.
• She explores the idea that matter is not inert but rather dynamic and responsive to its environment.
• The conversation highlights the potential for architecture to evolve by integrating biological principles into design.

• Life, Mind and Matter: Chemistry for an Ecological Era
• Monstrous Matter: The Microbial Foundations for a Living Planet
• Biodesign for a culture of life: Of microbes, ethics, and design
• How do the origins of life sciences influence 21st century design thinking?
• Rachel Armstrong — Faculty of Architecture

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Many thanks to Freak Motif for the music and Sebastian Abboud for the logo.

What is up, Brad fans?

How you doing?

How you living?

Apologies for the absence over the last couple months.

I did just move back to Canada.

I'm here now.

I'm settled, and I'm going to get back to a regular episode release schedule.

Having said that, I am super happy to bring you this episode because My guest today, Dr. Rachel Armstrong, is incredibly fascinating, and she has an incredibly fascinating backstory.

She began her career as a medical doctor and is now a professor of architecture at KU Leuven, a university in Belgium.

And she'll explain to us how an experience working with leprosy patients in India set her on this long and winding journey to where she is now.

And I'm going to warn you now that the conversation moves fast.

She drops a lot of names and a lot of terms that you might not have heard of.

But that's okay.

It doesn't matter.

Because the reason I'm so excited about this conversation is because it's fundamentally about something bigger.

A question.

What if?

Now, the question of what if is.

Something that I've been bumping into a.

Lot in other stories that I've been working on.

And it seems so simple.

But if we look at a lot of our scientific discoveries, breakthroughs, new technologies, things that really change the way the world works, it all starts with a simple question.

What if?

What if we viewed systems, things, theories, information, knowledge, the way we do things in a slightly different way, and a small shift in perspective can unlock untold possibilities.

And from there, that's when our science and our technology and all of these other things kick in and we can build out new things based on this simple shift in perspective that unlocks all of these possibilities.

And for Dr. Armstrong, that shift in perspective was, how are we using the materials that we use to build things?

Why do we use them in this way?

And that led to another fundamental question of what if matter itself is not the thing that we thought it was?

Sounds a bit weird, but let me explain.

In one of her papers that's linked in the show notes below, questions Whether matter, atoms, molecules, the stuff that everything is made of is actually passive or inert, she says, what if it's active?

What if we shift our perspective to understand and accept that it is active and that it changes in response to the environment, what molecules are around it, temperature, pressure, all these things that we know happen from chemistry.

What if we leverage that rather than trying to fight against it?

When we look at our built world,.

Things like concrete and steel, we pour so much energy into making those things rigid, unmoving unresponsive.

What if we leveraged the malleability of chemistry, the active nature of molecules and atoms, so that our world begins to be a world in which structures, our technology reacts to us, to our environment, to our needs.

It can change over time, depending on what we need at that moment.

And you can start to see how we can begin to work embedded in nature, embedded in the physical reality of how chemistry works, rather than, again, pouring all of our energy and resources into fighting against it and building structures and technology that separates us from these fundamental rules of reality and nature and chemistry.

What would our world look like if we had buildings that reacted to us, to air quality, to our health, to the temperature, to the environment?

What if we could use the materials, all of the matter that's around us, rather than having to ship things around the world, build concrete and steel beams in one location and ship them to other places?

What if we could just use what's available to build this dynamic living world?

Again, it sounds a little weird, but when you hear Dr. Armstrong talk about it and some of the examples that she uses of protocells and living bricks, it begins to become a bit more plausible.

What if we just use the tools that we have, the matter that our world exists in a different way?

And to me, that is what is so optimistic and inspiring about this conversation.

And again, when it clicks in your head, what if?

What if we just looked at it a different way, you start to see the possibilities that she does.

And I have to say, though, too, that what if is often a question that gets so much pushback.

We have ingrained systems, we have ingrained ways of thinking that we, we operate on.

How do we get beyond that?

And it's a question I asked her as well, and she has some examples of how we can start to make the small changes where we need to go to show that these things can work.

And once you show that the what if Is possible, you make it not just something that we have to work towards or really struggle to get, but something that becomes inevitable, something that becomes a thing you can't live without.

So I want to thank Dr. Armstrong again for coming on the show, and I really encourage you to read the paper that I've linked in the show notes, and I'll put a few down there if I can find access to all of the papers, because it's a really fascinating view and look at how fundamental shifts happen in society.

And it all begins with a what if.

So before we get going, I want to just say, what if you were to subscribe, like, leave a comment, help this show, spread these kind of ideas.

Thank you so much for those that have.

And please enjoy the conversation with Dr. Rachel Armstrong.

So welcome, Rachel Armstrong, to the show.

Thank you so much for taking the time to be here.

It's my pleasure.

It's lovely to meet you.

Yes, thank you.

Likewise.

So you are in the Faculty of Architecture, Department of Architecture at KU Leuven.

So we're both here in Belgium.

But the papers that drew me to your work, these two papers that I found that will be.

We'll link them in the show notes so people can find them, didn't sound like architecture papers to me.

They dealt with chemistry, with evolution, with biology, microbes, all of these different ideas and things, philosophy, even not things that I would normally associate with architecture.

So I was really, really excited to talk to you.

And I think we should start with what is your background?

How did you end up in this position where your professor in architecture, but talking about chemistry and microbes and all of these different things, where did this all begin?

And how and how did you end up here?

I think that despite all the challenges that we're faced with or we hear about in the news every day, I think it's very easy to lose sight of what an amazing, wonderful world we're in.

And that's one of the things that's really driven me.

My background is that I started off with this deep interest in biology and life, particularly how life happened.

And so I studied medicine because that was a way into understanding just how things worked, really.

And from there, I think this was, it was.

It was really good that I started off in an applied science because I very quickly came up as I started to meet people, the other issues around science that make things possible or not possible.

So whilst the theory about a healthy sounds very doable, in practice, in the real world, people come up against all kinds of different obstacles, many of which are not their own fault.

And so this relationship between life and context, ideology and practice was really written into a medical education and then medical practice.

And during that time, I did a sabbatical in Pune in India.

And that was a completely different world for me.

I probably had culture shock owing to the extreme differences between the very wealthy and the very poor and a kind of a cultural context where, you know, the way that I was brought up to see the world just didn't apply anymore.

And when I did this visit to a leprosy colony, I started to see how very simple interventions can make a huge difference to people's life.

So I was assisting a wonderful hand surgeon who was restitching the tendons from fingers into the thumb so that you young patients that had difficulties with grasping now could move their hands in a way that allowed them to grip, because that was essentially where their work lay.

The work was in the hands.

So if your hands didn't work, you really couldn't get work.

And so weird things here that I was able to converse with the patient whilst they were having these operations because you didn't need anesthesia, because the patient couldn't feel, because the leprosy bacillus eats the peripheral nerves.

And so there was this kind of dynamic conversation where you could ask the patient to move their hands whilst the operation was going on and test whether the transplant worked and then followed through with the recovery period where the physiotherapy started.

So these patients would put their hands into this wax, you know, and keep learning how to use their body again.

So they now had to think of their thumb through the mapping that they had for their forefinger.

So every time they wanted to use their thumb, they had to remember what it was to use a forefinger.

And this kind of whole body training and then simple extensions that protected the body, like sections from car tires, that kept the foot in an upward position to stop foot drop, and then scraping the foot along the floor, causing ulcers and infections which they didn't even feel.

All of these very simple devices.

Another example would be pots and pans that had handles on them that were a meter long or that kind of dimension so that the person with leprosy didn't get too close to the fire and burn themselves inadvertently.

So this relationship between the body, life, technology and culture was really overwhelmingly marvelous in some ways.

I mean, it was consternation, you know, like, wow, you know, all those things that I learned in my medical Western handbook about the way the body works and what the protocols for a good life and a good body should be just didn't apply in this context.

And so, like, from that time, I really had to start rethinking what could I do with my medical knowledge, what could I do with this interest that I had in life?

And how could I apply that in a way that, that matched this rupture in my frameworks for thinking.

And that's where I started to think about architecture.

Because in terms of the relationship between science and culture, it wasn't the medicine necessarily that was making all the difference.

Many of the adaptations that these people had to reclaim their life were actually socio cultural.

And in that context, the environment in which they lived.

So by having high mechanical advantages on tools, they could make electronic devices, and that's what they used to sell to their local city, which was Pune.

And also in terms of just living a productive life, living a life with meaning, tending the soil, feeding the chickens, all those ordinary things that a person who is unclean and often abandoned by their own families needed just to have that sense of self and integrity.

So I really started to thinking about, okay, so obviously medicine can do amazing stuff in the body, but most people don't get access to that.

And most people have an environment that can be constructed and designed in a particular way.

And so I started to think about this relationship between environment, not just nature, because often when we think about nature, we think of trees and flowers and fields and wildernesses and seas, which is not our experience of every day.

90% Of our lives is actually spent in the indoor space.

So most of our understanding of nature is not a lived experience.

So the question then becomes, can we get this idea of a healthy whole life built into the environments around us, beyond the body and kind of extending into space?

How does that relationship between life, the body and the things that are around us now start to impact again on our well being?

Not just the physiological, biochemical aspects, which I love, but also in those emotional, psychological, aspirational aspects of our being that are of huge importance so that life has meaning no matter where you are or who you are.

So these were the kinds of things that really started to drive me.

And at the time there was really no direct link between medicine and architecture.

And so it was a journey that I kind of had to invent in a way.

So I essentially came across a work by Helen Chadwick, which was in the Barbican Centre I was just on.

When I came back to the uk, I just really needed to reorientate myself.

It was no longer enough.

I mean, it was great.

I had a fantastic medical education.

I went to Cambridge and Oxford and, you know, it was wonderful, but it just, it felt incomplete.

And so I started to look way beyond my comfort zone into spaces that I never thought about before.

And art galleries became one of them.

And when I saw Helen Chadwick's work, it was in this European Union exhibition.

And it was a photograph called Self Portrait.

And it was the artist hands holding a dissected brain.

And I was just transfixed by it because There was a paradox.

There was a living set of hands and the brain itself was not alive.

But then I started to do my medical thing and I started looking at the person's hands and I saw koila nychia, which are these spoon like depressions on the nails.

And then I started to want to find the artist or whoever was holding this brain and tell them, you know, that they needed to get checked out by their doctor.

So, like, my response to a different field at that stage was to use the things that I know and project what I knew into that space.

And so I remember actually, Helen Chadwick had the most generous response to this rather ambitious and rather lost individual asking about her hands over her kitchen table.

A bit more like a fortune teller than a.

Than a medical doctor.

And then she said to me, well, come downstairs and see my piss flowers.

And I went, what are they?

You know, So I went downstairs and these were castings that she and her partner David Notarious had made in the snow in Canada.

And they looked like different flowers just because of the space that was left by the hot urine in the snow.

And they'd use this plaster of Paris to fill it up and they'd kind of cut it all out and it looked amazing.

And I just thought, wow, these are great.

Eurodynamic studies.

Captured the moment, you know, as the sculptural object.

And the other thing that she said to me that I'll never forget was that I used a very strange language for communicating with her.

It was absolutely loaded with medical terminology.

And I think half of her didn't quite understand what I was getting at.

And the other half was completely entertained by this alien that had come into her kitchen, responding to things that were very banal and ordinary to her as an artist.

You know, urination.

She was an artist with a very strong feminist artist with a very strong interest in the body.

She did landscapes that were made of cells, called viral landscapes round about the time of hiv.

And she worked with Peter Gabriel up at Box Mill.

And, you know, she was kind of unlocking these biological worlds through her artistic sensibilities.

I was just amazed by what could happen to stuff that I've been describing in very Latin based terms.

You know, this vernacular stuff could be so magical and amazing.

And I think that's really where it began.

It began in an artist's kitchen who had these amazing sculptures, you know, down in the basement.

It could have all gone badly wrong.

But this is, I mean, wow.

Okay, so that's not.

It's not how I expected the Story to begin with, medicine and this journey that you've just so eloquently described.

Also, I am Canadian, I'm originally Canadian.

So I'm never going to look at yellow snow the same now.

It's going to be, it's a whole new world now.

But I think, like, it's really fascinating to see.

And I've, I've been speaking to more and more scientists about the overlap of art and science and how, and I was looking at it from, you know, two human pursuits that really, art, more, more on the surface sort of portrays values or can portray the values of the artist and science, we don't think of that way, but I think it's, it's actually true.

Right.

And so there is this overlap here.

And now we're talking about the actual physical overlap of using biological material as a medium through which to make art.

And so it's just a recent thing kick that I'm on is this overlap between the process of art and art and science.

And I think that's a great starting point that you brought here is how do you bring then the living world, this world of science, into a domain that maybe didn't really have it and having this holistic view of things.

Because I think when I think of your work and the stuff that I've read it, it has this, you know, holistic view.

And I think this is something that we, we miss in science.

I, I did a PhD just to give you my background, so I understand the, the, the, the narrowing of focus that goes on.

And I think that this is something that, that happens in a lot of science.

And again, your work is having this holistic view.

So how do you go from this, If I can put a question here, how do you, did you always kind of have that holistic view?

You mentioned it in, in your experience in India, but how do you avoid this reductionism that we have in, in like, let's say biology, something where we just looking at, you know, one thing or one aspect and then trying to answer one question about it, and then maybe you get some little technology here or there.

But how did you sort of break out of that?

Was it just this experience in India or was there something else that really pushed you to that?

I think it was those early experiences, both by meeting amazing artists, that just blew my mind and also with that kind of being immersed in a different reality.

And I think the, the approach that I took was not to abandon one for another, but to be able to somehow or other navigate both the expanded rules or the Expanded frameworks that come with an artistic practice or standing in a different world where none of the familiar baggage that you carry with you that orientates you in the world applies, but also then being able to switch into the detail so that you've got something to lock onto that then gives you that navigational point through which you can start to create.

Oh, what?

Well, how might I call it?

We probably would call it a prototype, but it's more like an avatar.

It's a proposition that helps you find your way through something where you can only see part of the way forward, so that you can't see all the destination.

I think in science, we're expected, even when we're doing research, to be able to see the destination.

You will not be able to get the funding if you cannot almost specify exactly what it is that you're going to do.

There is obviously some uncertainty built in, but your peer reviewers will say, well, we want to narrow that risk so that we know that you arrive at this destination that you can see.

Yeah, but in the arts and design, you don't necessarily have to see that destination.

Or it's exciting when you don't, because then it really becomes this realm of discovery.

And for me, that that space where you can find some footing because total disorientation is not really productive.

You're kind of curating your learning process, but no one's given you the textbook for how to go about.

So it's the iterative exploration from a starting point that may be shared.

And I think that when you start to create these frameworks, or let's say, make yourself vulnerable to broader frameworks than the ones that you're familiar with, and allow people to come from different disciplines to be in conversation or exchange with you in some way, to agree on some kind of principle for going forwards then gives you that grounding to really start to test the interconnections between disciplines.

People, subjects, stories.

And stories for me, are incredible frameworks for letting people in.

So, for example, in.

In science, technical specificity really becomes very exclusive and necessarily so, because, like, you know, not everybody should have an opinion on a muon.

I mean, there are certain things, you know, that the guardrails need to be up on.

Right.

But there are other times where our observations do need to become more vulnerable to external influence.

And I think particularly when that starts to involve people, society, things outside of the scientific realm.

But like me in the kitchen of Helen Chadwick, our concepts and our language is so rarefied and dense, it's really hard to let other people in.

So what I mean by storytelling is not just, you know, the once upon a time stuff.

And it's fun to do that, but it is about maybe the what if creating a framework that allows lateral movement without having to prove somebody right or wrong.

And I think what I would refer to is actually a wonderful mathematician.

See, I. I've been very lucky to have incredible conversations with wonderful people that I didn't plan and that, you know, really changed my, you know, capacity for things that I don't know about, but trying to kind of like keep them close because I'm aware all the time there are things beyond my own thinking.

But a great conversation I had was actually on a tour bus in Japan to a Shinto temple, and I sat next to Francois Chatelain, who's a mathematician.

She was a contemporary of Mandelbrot.

And I was thinking, oh my God, how am I going to talk to a mathematician for this three hour journey?

And she absolutely blew me away.

Essentially, she does something called qualitative computing.

And she taught me in those three hours that we mustn't lose sight of the philosophy of mathematics because like, the, you know, number theory shouldn't be dead.

And, you know, we only came across infinity and zero, you know, around the 17th century, and that absolutely revolutionized the way we thought.

And her innovation was to use numbers that were, you know, couldn't be, you know, couldn't be finitely divided by each other.

These are irrational numbers rather than integers which are used for computation, for digital computation.

Ones and zeros.

Right.

Very concrete, very finite.

And she said the reason she uses irrational numbers is because life is infinite.

And so if she doesn't use a symbol of infinity or that is her philosophy of life, that it has this infinite dimension and that she felt, and she was demonstrating through her mathematical theories that if she used a qualitative computing approach, that she might be able to open up new spaces for thinking about life, you know, through these symbolic concepts that allow us to relate to our thought, to the material world and therefore could discover new things.

And she was almost saying to me, you know, do not just let.

Let's say not just.

It wasn't just really market forces, but dominant ideologies kind of overshadow the fringes and the possibilities where we should be exploring.

It doesn't mean that we have to go down rabbit holes, but to really still consider the fundamental principles of our assumptions.

And so, like in three hours, you know, I was just totally turned into somebody who really wants to understand irrational numbers much better.

My mathematics, mathematics isn't up to the job.

But I completely got her concept about what that meant for computing.

And she was not knocking digital computing or modern computing, but she recognized that the constraints, the market constraints, she worked for IBM, these were real forces that stifled innovation.

Yeah, I think this is another tension that you've identified that I've been thinking about a lot of recently is this, you know, on the one hand, you know, science, you need that, like you said, that technical language, that sort of barrier of, not entry, but let's say standard of precision or whatever, you know, when you're trying to answer a specific question about something that gives you some piece of data that has your knowledge.

But I think on the other hand, as, again, as you've, as you've said, I think we've become so focused on this, you know, again, this reductionist way and this sort of, like you said, de risking things and you know, these market forces, whatever it is that is driving science sort of in one way, and we've sort of lost this experiential side of it, the philosophical side of it, and asking the what if questions, as you mentioned with your storytelling.

The what if?

Well, what if.

There is a different way, and I think about a lot in our current, current state of the world and, and where technology and stuff, we're using more and more and more and more technology, but we're only thinking about it in one way, in one direction.

And there's a handful of people that are driving that, that conversation.

Right.

Or that, that, that the direction of technology and what we're using it for.

But this is where science again, is a human endeavor which needs a discussion of values, of emotions.

And this is where art is the reflection for us on that.

But because we started science to learn so that we could survive.

And then we started asking big questions about meaning and why we're here and the what ifs, like, what if we could do this, what if we could do that?

And I think we're kind of missing that.

And so to hear someone like yourself that's speaking about those things, I think this is what really drew me to some of your work.

And it's interesting to hear the influences that got you thinking about these things, both experiences and people.

And so I think we should probably.

We've been talking here for almost 20 minutes now.

We should talk about these papers or this sort of broader thesis that you've come to that I think is so fascinating.

And it's this, as I understand it, I'll let you take the Floor in a second and I'll maybe go on a bit of a little description of myself and my own philosophy or thought process here.

Because I studied biology and I, along the way in studying biology, I acquired the, the notion or the, the standard thinking or whatever that, you know, biology was this sort of weird thing over here that didn't really fit all the rules.

But physics was the, that was the fundamental, you know, fabric of reality, right?

And then chemistry operated based on principles of physics.

And then through chemistry you could kind of explain biolog.

And so biology was always just this, you know, offshoot that we couldn't really study in the same rigor as the other ones.

And that's what made it kind of weird.

As we've gotten more and more technology, I think we can study biology in the same way, but we understand, I think now that you know, the chemistry, I, I should say what I am coming to understand now.

After speaking with a lot of chemists, my career took me in just a direction that I cover chemistry a lot for whatever reason, but biochemistry, I see chemistry as this unifying force.

And maybe it is actually the sort of fundamental thing about reality because it is the interaction of matter, which is life, which is the stars, which is everything.

We have matter, we have atoms, we, we have these things moving around and they interact to create different things, right?

And again, if we just think of it in a sort of narrow frame of organic, inorganic, you're missing maybe the picture, right?

We're missing the transitions that is happening inside of our bodies all the time, or the transitions of what we would call like an inorganic thing getting incorporated into an organic thing and that flow.

And I know it kind of.

This is also something I wanted to talk to you about.

We could get to later is the use of language and stuff.

Because when you talk about these things, it can start to hardcore scientists, let's say it starts to sound unscientific, it starts to sound too emotional, too hippie or whatever you want to call it, right?

This like unifying force and the flow of energy and matter and stuff.

But more and more I think of it as like that film the Matrix, you know, when you see the code and you finally see the real like and you see things for what they are, this ever changing thing.

And I think that's kind of what your work is tapping into, if I'm, if I'm reading it correctly, but that there is a different way to view matter.

And by different, by viewing matter in a different way, we can not only see evidence of this, this new way in evolution.

You make some arguments about how, like, this is how, you know, the beginnings of life may have started, but it also then goes to what if.

What if we view matter in a different way?

What would that mean for our technology?

What would that mean for our lived spaces that you're talking about?

How could we create new things with this?

So that is what, like, blew me away when I was reading some of your work and just had me really fascinated about this.

You know, what if.

What if there's a different way to think about it.

And that is a big.

That's a very general thing to talk about, a lot of ideas that you've put out there.

So I'll kind of leave it to you then to maybe bring us through some of the details.

But what is this way of looking at matter that you've come to.

And maybe you could describe what it's.

Why it's different than the way that we maybe currently view things and our technology.

Well, thank you.

That's a great analysis.

I think chemistry is actually the Cinderella of the sciences right now.

And I think that comes from the Enlightenment split from the brute, Newton's word, matter that doesn't really do anything to this vital essence.

Now, whether that is the mind or the soul, you know, it has been, let's say, you know, secularized, but.

Or emergent properties.

Exactly.

There's a lot of kind of secular, vital language that we use quite commonly.

And I think this is why physics, you know, being the mathematical component that Descartes said was closer to God, so that you can do anything with that because it's not attached to the material realm.

You then impose that kind of abstract representation onto the material realm and say, this is the way that it is through natural law.

The other aspect that, that fits into is biology.

And there's still this very prevalent vitalism within biological discourse, particularly, you know, when it comes to not just origin of life, but also the special nature of the human brain.

I think that's one of those things that hasn't really got rid of its religious overtones.

You know, there's a big mystery there that we can't.

That we can't seem to crack.

And it's.

Yeah, exactly.

But I think the.

But that never happened for chemistry.

Chemistry was left as the brute, you know, ugly sister, as it were, the Cinderella that didn't get any of those special powers.

And therefore it was left in to be a recipient of either chemistry, either physics or biology.

And I think what's happened is that in the late 20th century there was a, let's call it the new materialist turn, let's call it where the idea that matter and force were not separated, that the potency of action was actually in the material realm itself.

But because of this split between the human mind, the vital force, the abstract, and this brute set of objects that needed instruction, this was a new journey really for philosophical thinking.

So new materialism has really come to the fore as the idea that the new physics and chemistry and biology are actually at the heart of empowering the physical realm in a computational way, not a, not a spiritual or even instructional way.

These are not codes, these are, these are more kind of generative from within the atom, the molecules, the assemblages of stuff itself.

And that has to be true in the sense that the world has come from, you know, the big Bang or wherever it, wherever it came from, whatever our big story is, it's here.

So it started somewhere.

And it has to be material.

Matter has to play a role because the world is material, our world is material.

It's not abstract, it's not, you know, we may think of it as being animated by something, but our encounter with it is a very material interface.

And so the idea then if this is true, how do we go about talking about that now?

You know, the way that cybernetics proposed to through the abstract instruction of code.

But now that the new materialist platform is enabling us to kind of look at the generative properties of matter, think of its relational possibilities.

So if, if matter, so matter, the way matter performs is, is not independent of what, where it is or what it's next to.

You know, if you have hydrogen atoms in the middle of space, don't do very much, but if they're in, you know, in relationship to, you know, oxygen gas, then, you know, maybe we'll get water.

But that's a maybe.

And that maybe is because temperature and pressure and all the big Bang, you.

Know, so it wasn't always inevitable that hydrogen and oxygen would make water.

And it's not always, it's not still not inevitable.

It will, because we're at the triple point here on this planet and another planet may not be the temperature and the environmental conditions just may not be conducive to that.

Most Water does not exist as a liquid in the universe.

So these contingencies are really important.

And that's what new materialism did for philosophical language, which.

So people like Rosie Berdotti, Donna Haraway, Karen Barad, who is a physicist who talks about intra actions, so she talks about like the.

The tensions between the bodies that we might call atoms or particles.

She was actually a quantum physicist, you know, so she kind of knew about the negotiation, let's say, between, you know, atomic and subatomic bodies.

And so she was developing a language that allowed readers to think into that space of like a dialogue between things that aren't human.

But at the same time, about 10, 12 years later, round about the centenary of Alan Turing, there were all these other kinds of forms of computation that were coming out of the woodwork, like morphological computation, which was about a computation that was like soft robotics, that was driven by the form and the material that was actually in the robot itself and not just the program that the material itself performed.

Computation could solve a problem in this kind of repeatable way.

And the parameters of that, of course, are quite limited compared with biology.

But then there was another element which was called unconventional computing, which was really challenging.

You know, the conventions of, you know, kind of Turing completeness and, you know, kind of basic principles that digital computing had been enjoying.

And they started to narrate computational activities and things from, you know, spirit king crabs, swarms of crabs, to a reaction diffusion phenomena within things like slime molds.

All of these entities now could be looked at through the lens of computation.

And I think this was really important.

So from new materialism, setting this ability for things not to exist on their own, but to be in relation with other things, and that gets very complicated.

The language has to expand.

Then if you read a new materialist text, you'll probably think, ah, what's going on here?

And you have to concentrate very hard because it very quickly becomes quite complex and neologisms pop in.

You have to start inventing new words for things.

So, for example, Donna Haraway moves from autopoiesis, which is a cybernetic term about the individual entity making itself, to sympoiesis, which is about things making something together, right?

So that goes from an individualistic to an ecological framework for thinking through.

So from that, then we've got now computer scientists that are able to think through material phenomena, regard them as computation and not as code or divine intervention.

I think using the framework of computation, like Susan Stepney, for example, I absolutely love everything she does, but she comes up with this term called persuadable matter, which is that matter itself through its physical property.

So it just through being that matter in that context, in that space has a range of options.

And those options then become the driver for observable, reliable, predictable, maybe not infinitely predictable, but relatively predictable states and transformations.

So because there may be different options if you stack the possibilities in one way, let's say we lower the temperature, for example, so it does one thing and not another, then that is about being in a conversation with matter.

By altering the parameter space through which that agent is going to find its way to a solution.

By coupling the logic of computation, particularly the unconventional computing, with the parameter spaces that have been opened through new materialism, we can really start to think through, at different scales, the possibilities for molecular exchanges.

And obviously, this is not something that has been totally formalized.

It is still quite experimental in terms of its practice.

But there are definitely books and papers out there that are.

That are kind of exploring the possibility that if matter itself is able to perform part of a calculation, which of course, was Richard Feynman's challenge with nanotechnology, how does the nanobot know what to do?

Well, actually, chemistry itself has a range of options, depending on its starting point, and those then become the executable program.

And where it becomes really interesting is that.

So, you know, we could say that, you know, all matter, you know, unless it's a 0k, has a degree of liveliness, right?

So that potentially all matter could compute.

But where we see the computation most vividly is through Ilya Prigo Jean's dissipative structures, right?

Where matter, at far from equilibrium states is in an emergency to make a decision, and it's chucking out energy in order to try to stay in a stable configuration, producing geometry.

So, for example, tornadoes or snowflakes, you know, these are geometries that are produced through dissipative processes.

And so, you know, this is like matter in crisis.

You know, like, okay, I'm trying to stay as stable as I can here, but I have to release all this energy.

And in those moments, it becomes quite an interesting, malleable, environmentally contextualized form.

And I think for me, that that was also a very interesting kind of consideration, that if life is a dissipative structure as well, which is, you know, it is part of those.

Those categories, then this becomes very interesting because of the dynamic qualities of life in order to stay stable in its material configurations.

And the person who's really looking into the physics of that is Jeremy England at mit.

You know, and he comes up with this idea that the dissipative adaptation, so there's a kind of force, and this is coming from physics, you know, you know, that the force within matter in this dissipative state, you know, creates a kind of adaptive situation which over time becomes an evolutionary driver.

So there are these kind of insights into how matter is not in every single situation.

And obviously in architecture, we select for matter that doesn't change its state because of the economics of that.

Because, like, one of the most expensive aspects of having a building is its maintenance.

Because, you know, other dissipative things like life decide they're going to work on your nice stone wall or your bricks or the plumbing.

So that our selections for constructing our own habitats is, you know, based on the ideas of permanence rather than instabilities, which is what these computational insights into the performance of the material realm reveal to us.

This is a lot.

It's a lot to take in.

And I, but I really love it and I'm fascinated by it.

I want to try and see if I can recap some of the things just for my own understanding here.

But one of the core things that, that really stands out to me is this, you know, matter.

When we talk about matter, we think of like, molecules, right?

Like, like you mentioned the hydrogen.

And so they're in conversation with their environment.

So that's dynamic, right?

Like, and that's, to me, is at the core of this thing because that's how you can then start to, to, as you say this, there's like, you can, you can ascribe some kind of, I don't know, definition or like, let's say, put a scientific understanding on what we would normally, what we would have called 100 years ago is like vitalism, right?

Like, what is the spark of life?

Why do molecules in the body fall into this train where they're, you know, they're replicate?

Like the DNA replicates and the molecules find each other and they, and they react and they do all the reactions.

It's like you hit that domino and then all the other dominoes start falling.

So why is that?

Like, what was that spark?

But if you think of, of matter as this, these things that, that they, they encounter their environment and it's weird to say they're living, right?

Like, we wanted, we, we want to avoid those terms all the time in science, right?

Like, matter's not alive.

I mean, I think the term that you use in some of your papers is agentized matter.

So they have agency, right?

So they can Whether it's a molecule or an atom or whatever, somehow explore its space.

And it's got a set, you know, there's a parameter set with which it can act.

You know, electrons do things when they come to other electrons.

And that's physics gives us that language and framework to understand.

But if we think about the dynamic nature, rather than just, yeah.

Trying to force it into a stable state, and what can I do with it once it's in a stable state, you know, you can it again.

Yeah.

It sort of opens up this possibility of.

Of, well, what else can we do?

If we accept that our matter is in motion, it's in constant flux, it's in constant communication with the things around it.

And again, you, you have this.

It starts to sound unscientific if we talk about molecules as life.

But what you're, if I understand correctly, what you're actually doing is like it, it is very.

It is trying to make it scientific, but it's just a flip of perspective, right?

So computation doesn't have to be only silicone zeros and ones.

It can be the space in between the zeros and ones.

It could be the movement of swarms, of birds or molds or whatever.

You can use those things to do comp.

Like to have calculations.

And if we view our matter in this different way, well, what are the possibilities?

And I think that, that, that is so interesting to me.

That is what science is about, is this, you know, well, what if.

And so often it comes down to just these changes of perspective, right?

We're not fundamentally changing the calculations of, of how molecules interact.

You know, what's going to happen at this temperature, pressure.

If you put these molecules together, we can des that.

Right?

And we've become very good at doing that.

Right.

Like our whole society is built on petrochemical, you know, conversions.

Right.

Like that's.

We've built everything on it, but by looking at things in the way that we have looked at them.

And there's some other ideas and projects that I'm working on that I'm trying to tease out these ideas.

But you have the idea, and I can't remember which philosopher said it, but, but, you know, you have.

We've removed ourselves and we're trying to be that, that, that neutral observer of the living world.

And we interact with the living world, therefore, in that way where it's, it's an exploitative, you know, very brute way in which we use the resources in which we force them into our structures and things.

Whereas if we put.

And that fundamentally doesn't make sense because we're part of the world.

Like you can't, you can never actually be that godlike observer of everything.

Like it's just, it's not possible.

So then if we view our, our world and our, and, and, and us as part of it and this, as this flow of energy and molecules and, and the dynamics of it all, we can still use all of the resources on the planet.

Like it's not about you not using things, it's about well what is our relationship to them.

And if we use them with that relationship in mind, would, would it necessarily be that it like a one way consumption or would it be a give and a take?

And I think that's really interesting what I get from your work too because there's, it blends the interface of living and non living.

It helps describe.

You could make theories about the, the emergence of life and what is life and emergent properties.

But also from this sustainability angle which is then very applied, we often hear, well if we do all the green technology there's going to have to be.

Some kind of sacrifice.

Like our lives are going to be less because we can't exploit the planet.

But it's like there's actually probably a richness just in another way.

You know, it would certainly look different.

But we're still going to use everything, right?

No, I think this is great because I think, you know, this is about where you look for answers.

And in the modern era, because of this outside perspective, we need outside.

We assume that all of our solutions can be provided by external energy.

So if we're going to climb a stairs, if we put enough energy into that, we'll sort that out.

If we're going to split a molecule enough energy into that and we'll sort it out.

Most of the innovations for the 20th century are based on just bombarding it with energy rather than looking from the inside perspective, which is what is the inherent tendencies of these things and how can we augment, catalyze and extend those to perform the kind of work that this kind of stuff could naturally do.

And I like to create little experiments just to test my thinking.

And one of these would be the protocell technology that I was using for future Venice.

So the idea was what if I could have a tiny little brick or a tiny little builder, There's a droplet, a dynamic droplet that could be used to shore up the foundations of the city of Venice.

Because I knew that I needed water.

So which city would be better placed than the city of Venice?

So I was actually working with the European center for Fundamental Living Technology there and, and the center of Fundamental Living Technology in Denmark, and kind of going to the city of Venice to look at all these questions about origins of life and complexity.

I realized that I was walking through a city that was immersed in water, and I could also see round the canals or the rios, these mineralized coatings from bacteria and algae and, you know, just sediments from a city being in a space for over you know, a millennium.

And so from there I started to think, well, if I got these little dynamic droplets, which were part of the portfolio of the centers of living technology, and I programmed them to deposit minerals, could I then add other chemical programs, you know, like lighter version technology, so a photocatalyst that when it reaches light, it will go towards the darkness to try to construct a liquid based building unit that could help create a reef, a mineralized reef, underneath the city of Venice.

Now, obviously, I did some lab experiments which were very interesting, but as a UNESCO World Heritage protected site, this is not something that you could do in the lagoon.

However, we did work with Red Bull to get some tanks on the side of the lagoon, and we had a look at, you know, these protocells, kind of like reacting with a found brick and things like that.

So we got a bit of footage, you know, looking at how this mineralization might approach.

Now you, you know, there would be a lot of, you know, proper scientific development that would be needed in order for that technology to be progressed.

But, you know, through drawings, through working with, you know, very talented students and artists, we started to put together, you know, the idea of what this could look like, right?

So now we know the rules, you know, that there is a droplet, the surface mineralizes, it can move away from the light with a photo catalyst.

How might that start to configure itself?

And through art and design, you can start to build these what if scenarios based on a sliver of science.

Not to be ridiculous about it, because already you have constraints, you have gravity, you have geometries, you have depths, you have all kinds of parameters already in place.

We can use your computational rules to start to look at how, if this technology was realized, these reefs might start to appear.

And so this is where that kind of intersection with the origin of life, agentized chemistry and design and engineering come in, precisely for the reason that you mentioned earlier, which is the embodied carbon footprint of the built environment, which is 1% more than transport, which is ridiculous.

And because of this idea that we have to have external energy and force matter into blocks of material that, you know, don't exist on that site.

And so the question is, it's not to not have a house or anything.

The question is, how do we make more of the materials in situ and draw things out of the niches around us, these, these constructed spaces that we make for ourselves in order to be, I think, both more efficient in terms of where we get our materials from.

It is better obviously to grow our materials or burrow into them than it is to harvest them from the other side of the world and then build up tall and then knead fossil fuels in order to reach the top floor.

But also in terms of the kind of the local cultural synthesis, you know, the idea of value in these preferences.

When we make these preferences, you're looking at local customs and cultures and businesses and, you know, an extension of the community there, which are all invested in enabling a space to become lively.

And so where I've been trying to, let's say, develop biological extension, the implications of these technologies is really to think of the unit of a home.

So the question for me was always about, so what is the unit of construction?

Where do I actually start to begin?

What is it that I'm building with?

So for a biology, maybe it is the cell, maybe now it's actually a protein molecule.

I don't know at which level people have drawn the line as the unit of biology nowadays.

Is it DNA, is it an rna?

But I like the holistic idea of a cell.

So the idea of a brick became the kind of equivalent for a cell.

And so I was making a series of living bricks which essentially were microbial fuel cells, which are batteries that are powered by microbes that feed on wastewater and can produce bioelectricity and cleaned water and a range of other stuff, depending on how you program the biofilm and trying to incorporate those into construction.

So these were the Living Architecture project, and now I'm looking at the microbial hydroponics project, which extends this kind of ecology of designed microbial communities whose metabolisms are put into proximity with each other so that we can construct a circular infrastructure of exchange so that one microbes waste feeds the next microbe and their waste feeds the other migrate.

So it's kind of like the Living Architecture project going to put together different microbial communities to close that loop.

With microbial hydroponics, we've actually added plants into the ecosystem where the microbes are actually now in conversation with the naked plant roots of the hydroponics systems, because the plants don't grow up with Bacteria.

And so we're using the microbial fuel cell biofilms as the prosthetic rhizosphere, a bit like the people with leprosy that I was initially working with, with these simple technologies in order to extend the capabilities of their bodies.

This prosthetic rhizosphere is very much like what we might do for a hydroponics plant in the same kind of context, so that they can produce tastier biomass and that they can maybe defend themselves from potential pests and parasites.

So these are, these are kind of like part of selecting lively infrastructures, first of all for the construction of a home, and then the living materials, most of which are not load bearing.

So at the moment there's no substitute for concrete.

But we could think of different ways of building with our relatively soft but stable material.

But the idea is now how do we integrate all these different kind of ecologies?

And that's where I'm thinking about the idea of a meta holobiont in the sense that if forest ROHA describes a coral reef as a holobiont and that is constructed of a mineralized skeleton, which is not living per se, but all the coral organisms that are on the surface are contributing to a dynamic skeleton.

And then those corals are part of an ecology of other organisms, fish and bacteria and whatever the local ocean ecosystem is.

You can think of a building as actually being very similar to a reef like environment, so that the building itself is the mineralized structure.

But then the people, the cats, the dogs, the plants, the microbes, they're all part of this reef like structure.

And since, you know, cats, dogs and peoples are people, are holobionts themselves, then the building is not a holobiont per se, but it's actually a holobiont that houses other holobionts.

And so the kind of, the complexity of this starts to get very interesting.

Because of course, in this relational framework, the new materialist framework, all of us are interacting with each other and all of us are affecting each other to different degrees, how do we start to design spaces like that?

Because in order to have healthier bodies, if Darwin is right and the niche or the EES is right, the extended evolutionary synthesis with more variables than traditional modern synthesis, Darwinism, whatever you call it, if that is true, then all these variables are having a role in our body.

And if we are spending 90% of our lives indoors, the nature of these indoor spaces and being able to see the spectrum of influences actually becomes very important in terms of our individual health the impact that we have on the environment, notions of things like waste.

What if we could do away with the idea of waste and turn that into reusable resource, particularly the organic wastes that we produce every day in the home.

Can we actually turn that into bioelectricity cleaned water biomolecules depending on our microbial programming, so that instead of our homes being necessarily parasitic or obligate consumers of resources, actually it becomes a productive entity and maybe it doesn't provide everything we need.

But just imagine your utilities bills being radically slashed.

Just, just imagine like if disaster came, whether that's man made disaster or whether that's a climate catastrophe, that you are able to support you and your family with electricity, sanitation and water and even power, a GPS kind of WI fi to get help and you can stay healthy long enough for the rescue to come.

What kind of difference does that make to a world that at the moment seems incredibly uncertain?

So these are the kinds of transformations that I think become possible when you start to see a different platform and a different possibility of values, the exchanges and the basic science that can underpin it all.

The reef example is amazing because it's like, like you said, like the coral, the mineralized structure, like you could see a home of cement.

That analogy is perfect.

And then the living things that are within it.

And I think it's really interesting because it's just again, another shift of perspective.

The way we think about waste, the way we think about microbes.

It's, you get them, you know, clean my space, get them.

I don't want to interact with them.

We now know like our microbiome, everyone's familiar with that, so we know this.

But there's still this notion of like on the outside of my body, fine, they're in the, they're on the inside, they're on my skin, whatever.

But everything else in my, in my home, in my space needs to be sort of devoid of it.

Or you know, we have that, that adversarial view of it.

Whereas if you looked at your home as, you know, again, I'm.

The picture I have in my mind is like again.

And the ones and zeros of the Matrix movie are wrong because we're trying to get away from the ones and zeros.

But there's like a flow, right?

Like a flow of energy material.

You're talking about waste.

You're taking the carbon dioxide that we exhale.

All of this.

If you were in symbiosis with your home, with your environment, rather than you in this built sanitized structure.

What would that.

What would that be?

You know, there's a flow of everything from you with your.

With your walls, with the heating, with the temperature.

And I mean, that's how life operates on the planet, right?

Like we talk about taking inspiration from nature.

It's.

It finds that equilibrium so that different things can.

Can survive and use all of the things around them.

So it's really just like a shift of perspective.

And it's allowed.

That makes.

And it's allowing us to do proper niche construction.

We're constructing our niches right down to the molecular level.

And at that point, then this is where, let's say, culture and society comes in.

Because then in order to, you know, so every, you know, like every bird polices its.

Every bird polices its nest.

You know, you.

You have your own space and you have your own rituals of hygiene.

So hygiene now becomes the.

Let's call it.

It's almost like your own immunological rituals.

What stays, what goes.

So knowing that microbes are part of your home doesn't mean everything has to be nasty and slimy.

Right.

I think people tend to think in extremes that is either sterile and clinical or it's got to be just like the inside of your kitchen sink, you know, and it's not.

There are these.

There are these degrees and that.

I think that rituals of hygiene now then start to become the defining spaces of your.

Of how you construct that niche.

My hygiene ritual says that instead of using biocidal bleach, I will use instead a probiotic spray.

And my ritual for that is twice a week or once every two, or what, whatever, you know, my space and biology decrees, you know, And.

And they become.

Yeah, exactly.

So.

So they become, let's call it habitualized.

They become part of our rituals of everyday life.

We don't notice them.

And they're already probably here, you know.

Yeah.

And then I think the other, the other part.

Part of that is really about values, because opening up these frameworks means that we aren't constrained by external values.

So the market logic in particular.

And that if we go back to the idea of the home, the Greek term for home is ecos, which is the root also of ecology.

And the ecos in ancient Greek really refers to not the house itself, but household management.

How do we manage our homes?

And what's interesting then is if we take this circular perspective or this ecosystem perspective, because there's never true circularity because there are always energy leaks or, you know, you want to enjoy yourself, it doesn't have to Be hair shirt.

But the idea that we've kind of got this ecosystemic approach means that within this ecosystem there's a set of values and protocols, a bit like hygiene, that allow us to maintain a certain dynamic.

And that system then becomes economics.

The things that are valued to be upcycled, the things that are discarded, the things that needed to be traded, all of this becomes an economics of the home.

So now we have an economia, which allows our homes to make value for us and not just to have the marketplace, which is, you know, something that the Greeks didn't really like to do anyway.

This, this kind of external, obligate set of values and aspirations that are quite alien to the.

To the niche construction that we've dedicated our lives and our families have dedicated their lives to.

So there's a kind of re.

Equilibration putting power back into the home occupant and their family to be able to reuse things to benefit themselves.

And if they have some leftover, they can benefit.

Their neighbors or communities can decide what they do with these resources.

But what it does do is it takes us off this idea of being obligate consumers of resources from elsewhere and absolutely strapped to a marketplace.

And I think that for a real understanding of what this new term called regenerative architecture, which is really sustainability plus giving something back.

So to try to reduce harm, sustainability.

But regenerative now also invites us to give something back.

And I think without the infrastructure, without the right kinds of materials and the right building systems and the right utilities, then we can't really achieve this state that has a proper relationship with the natural world and kind of like taps into the natural cycle so that human living becomes a strengthening force for the natural world by providing resources and metabolizing produce in this cyclical, reciprocal manner than what we've done, you know, certainly in the last 150 years, which is take things from elsewhere and turn it into something completely unusable for which we have.

Don't really want any responsibility.

We chuck it down the, you know, garbage disposal chute, or, you know, it goes into a sewer and we never see it again.

But kind of like.

Yeah, exactly.

But taking that responsibility.

Responsibility, you know, kind of like taking the responsibility of being part of an ecosystem and kind of understanding what those exchanges are, I think is part of it.

Now, obviously modernity helped us shed some of those responsibilities.

So, for example, swapping a car for a horse means that you don't have to feed your horse before you go to bed, you know, and poop it and all those kinds of things that obviously are a chore to somebody.

And the convenience of not having to do that care became very attractive because it.

But you swap it out for the money that you have to pay to maintain the car and put gas in it.

So this is all part of the economy.

So perceived conveniences become kind of later challenges and problems to solve, which is where we're finding ourselves at the moment.

Mm.

So this is.

I mean I love the niche construction thing because that was something, you know, in my biology.

Since I left biology and molecular biology, I came upon niche construction and the idea that it is a fundamental thing of life that we build little habitats and that we pass that on to our.

You know, so it's an evolutionary thing.

It affects the course of life and how we evolve and stuff is our niches.

So we should have our niches in this way be this more holistic view.

I wondered.

I just.

We've been talking for a while and I want to respect your time and eventually let you go.

But I want to ask about the pushback that you must.

I'm assuming you receive on this because I just, even just in talking, in our conversation here, talking about these things, you can envision the eyes rolling for certain people, you know, because there's still this.

And I keep.

I've said it several times now.

It's just, it feels like there's just a change in perspective, right.

A change in what you value, how you're going to go about doing things.

That feels simple, right.

But is actually the biggest hurdle I think to get over when you're talking about some of these things.

Now we can talk about where some of this technology exists along the pipeline of efficiency and whether it could replace the systems that we do because I think anything is possible.

Right.

But we do have to consider the trade offs, the sacrifices and the amount of labor and disruption that it would cause to people to maybe switch over to these things.

I optimistically think that it wouldn't be that bad.

You could, you could integrate these sort of things smoothly.

But how do you, what, what type of pushback do you get?

Do you see that sort of people just be like, ah, this is just, you know, sort of, yeah, I don't know, hippie or whatever.

I don't know what the, what the word is, you know, but like there's convincing people that it's possible and that it's worth the investment to try and realize it I imagine is very difficult.

If you look in the literature now, the number of people doing biodesign and bioconstruction and living architecture, it's absolutely staggering to me that given the hostility that the initial ideas provoked, that the ideas actually are finding their footage.

And I think particularly because there is this intersection with, you know, scientific development.

However, having been a TED Fellow, I also see the resistance more than science, actually as skeptical and, you know, and rightly so, you know, because like the scientific brain or the scientific approach is to really critically, you know, to tear down an idea.

Right.

I mean, that's the natural instinct and.

See what's left, see how it's.

Exactly.

And the thing is that in design, the ideas are very early and they're very easy to tear down.

So you just have to get a bit tough with that because you're not saying it's already happened, but it is the what if I can map out this trajectory, create this framework for possibility.

And yes, absolutely, it's met with skepticism.

However, the marketplace is even more ruthless.

How do you make money out of this?

Is probably the biggest stumbling block that you'll come across because people want a lot of returns straight away.

So that's probably the biggest obstacle to kind of breakthrough innovation.

However, the way that we can get around this and the way that we're actually trying to.

I'm glad you have an idea because that's that, that.

The market thing.

I do stuff.

Sorry to interrupt, but I do stuff with.

I write a lot about bioproduction and, you know, a lot of things associated with that.

And it's.

Everything always just comes down to how do you displace fossil fuels from an economic standpoint?

And it's like, it's.

It's a mountain that's just so big because those structures are so built in and they're so baked into everything that to compete economically with that giant is just.

It seems impossible.

But anyway, please continue with an idea for a solution.

We're actually, at the moment, I haven't.

Haven't submitted my form yet, but we're working with a community in Uganda, disadvantaged people, and we'll be bringing the microbial hydroponics prototypes out there.

We'll be looking at biomaterials resource use.

So together with the sludges from the microbial hydroponics to grow their.

To grow their food, we will use the Sludges to as a binder for agricultural waste.

So like banana skins.

And so you can through the home economy.

Not yet.

Even an SME?

Not yet.

We'll try with households to see if we can actually create construction materials and get rid of a very, very serious problem, which is household waste going into streams.

So if we can help mitigate that, then if that actually becomes the basis for a home economy and people can actually generate living or a life income, that becomes a real proof of principle.

Now, it doesn't have Western infrastructure and it's a big advantage that we don't.

If you think about actually African development and the Internet, that didn't have to go through all those underground tapes.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Went straight to mobile phone.

Right.

So kind of bypassing crippling infrastructure, I think, is the way of doing it.

And really thinking again about what we said earlier here about the value to people, if we can actually think who this could really benefit now, then we stand a much better chance of creating enough demonstrators to get the momentum going.

The other group of people that I think would be very interesting to reach out would be people with mobile homes.

Because if your mobile home can actually be off grid because you're able to reprocess your waste and you cut down the number of gas cylinders you need, but you get the same kind of quality of life, that becomes a real economic advantage to the individual.

And because the home is such a customizable space, we're not saying that every household needs the same thing.

First of all, the knowledge becomes transferable, then we can, you know, find out how people might locally customize things in order to set up some of the principles rather than always a consumer good.

So to get the idea and the habit of experiencing how we might sustain ourselves in different ways up and running, I think we have to think outside of the usual formal routes for innovation.

And I think we need to do that at a time where there is a need for paradigm shifts in our thinking and our practice.

Yeah, it makes complete sense that you go to the place where they're not burdened by that infrastructure, because it wasn't there.

So it makes sense.

And I think the individual approach as well, I think that is also probably appealing to more and more people in Western society who want to unshackle themselves from some of the economics of the system that doesn't seem to be working for them in many ways.

So how can I get myself off of that?

I think there's still going to be a barrier in terms of what's the word Sanitizing some of the ideas for the average consumer, let's say.

I don't want to say average consumer in a derogatory way, but, but you know, a waste system, using their own waste or something like that.

And I'm thinking of friends I have that are already like involved in this kind of thing, but they have like a worm cupboard in their, in their home.

You know, so they have a drawer that you pull out and there's this bunch of worms in there and it's feeding the.

They put their bio waste in there, you know, food waste and it, and they use it in the garden.

But like, it's a pretty shocking thing to see someone with a worm drawer.

Exactly, exactly.

But also you could, you know, another way is again, this is about the storytelling.

How do you open up the space so that you can invite people in rather than saying this is what it is and then people run screaming from the room.

Another way of approaching these conversations is through the economic benefits.

Because the price of living is high.

Yes, it's probably the biggest issue of our time right now is affordability, cost of living, wealth inequality.

So the question is not whether or not you want worms, but can you afford not to have them?

You know, I mean, it's going, it's going to, you know, how, how far can we actually sustain a decent standard of living through things that we can reuse again so that we're not always having to pay, you know, all these extra costs to, you know, very, very wealthy people and also the people that own infrastructures, the more independence that we can have from that, you know, like having our own wi fi systems and you know, that we don't have to pay rent for things all the time, all of these things.

You know, small reductions could make a big difference to families that, you know, are not necessarily dirt poor, but not also particularly wealthy and are really, you know, feeling the difficulties of these times.

Yeah, yeah, it's really interesting appealing to that.

I mean, it's appealing to it to sell, you know, appealing to individualism and then, you know, community, oops, sorry, communities and everything, but just it, yeah, it makes sense that it's, it's this ground up thing, but again, it's not to be cynical or, or negative, but it's.

You see the cha.

I can see the challenges because you need money to get this stuff going.

You know, I already thought in my head when, when we were talking about going to places like Africa and whatnot, where I can already hear people being like, yeah, but how are we going to make money on those, Those people don't have money.

So how are we going to make money on them?

But I think what you're talking about, if I'm understanding correctly, you need enough proof of principle.

And if you have enough proof of principle that this, that these ideas can work and that they can be flexible and that they can be interchangeable and that everybody can kind of do it, then there becomes a momentum and a pressure for somebody to provide individuals with the means to do this with their home or the means to do this with their.

That I get that.

Is it fast enough?

Is it enough?

I don't know.

Nothing's fast enough.

We need everything tomorrow.

And I guess the other people that we could reach out to would be very high end users.

So the bespoke, you know, luxury hotel that was sustainable, those would be the other kinds of demonstrators that would need to be made.

But I think, you know, I think again, go back to the storytelling.

And many people now are, you know, fully engaged in researching the area.

So I think, you know, like, the skepticism comes because it hasn't been done yet.

Yeah.

And I mean, I'm an optimistic person, so I always, I ask the questions because I think we have to ask the question to sort of think about the solutions.

Right.

But I do think that it is like you can make these switches, it is possible.

Like, and you have to try.

You have to do something in order for anything to happen.

Right.

So you can't just sit there and say, well, it's, it's impossible.

Right.

Even though it looks very daunting.

I just, I think in my own world, because science journalism is so much reporting, it feels like you do so much reporting on ideas and things and you're waiting for the, for the ball to really, for the snowball to get big enough to really roll, you know, and it's just, excuse me, it can be a little, I don't know, I don't want to use the word demoralizing, but it can be, it could be tough sometimes.

So I, I love hearing your energy, I love hearing your passion.

I, I love the, the realism that you bring to it too, and that it's like, you know, some of these technologies are not there yet.

Like it's not.

We haven't reached that.

That point.

But we have to try.

And again, I just think this philosophy of looking at matter in a different way and our relationship to it, you can see the knock on effects that.

Excuse me.

That go to our technology.

But also I think it's a message for science itself.

Right.

To break out of the way that we're thinking about things.

This is what science is supposed to do.

And I think we've using science, this term, this monolith.

Right.

But it's the field of science, the industry, the institutions do feel kind of locked in one way of thinking and one way of funding and one way of thinking about knowledge and chemistry and physics and stuff.

And so it's a message for that as well.

So thank you.

Thank you for spending your time.

I'll let you go now.

It's been an hour and a half.

Unless you have one final message to send us off with.

Yeah, I think that change is always coming and I think we should just embrace it and being able to find a way in a platform through which you can start to read new possibilities and start telling the stories of the worlds that you would like to see and live in.

I think we have to put those thoughts into the world and carry them with us, no matter what discipline we're in.

Beautiful.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for your time.

I look forward to following along with what you're up to next and the other things.

And I would love to have another conversation about these topics somewhere down the line.

Thank you so much.

Thank you very much.

Once again, a big thanks to Dr. Rachel Armstrong for taking the time to be on the show and thank you for listening.

I really appreciate it.

And if you haven't already, please, like, subscribe, review, comment, wherever you get this.

It really helps out the show a lot.

That's all I got.

See you next time.

Time.

Bye for now.

Sa.