Office Hours The Side Projects Edition N°314 happened on June 26, 2026 at 0900 California time (UTC-7).

Here’s the link to the video tape recording of the session.

(One quick note at the outset about this one is this: I’m pretty excited about is that this side-project share from Graeme Reid — described in all manner of agentic summarization below — led to a follow-on design fiction artifact that Raphael Fajardo and I worked on that afternoon, which is now live as the Denver Public Biometic Biblioteque Data Hybridatarium. That was all unexpected, but an indication as to how effective these Office Hours conversations can become. More on that in a separate post.)

The day’s share was from Graeme Reid and his Royal College of Art Design Futures research project, After Sterility: Negotiations with the Microbial Home.

Graeme’s project starts from a familiar domestic assumption: sterile equals safe. The project asks what happens when that assumption becomes a cultural habit, a product category, a gendered burden, a public-health inheritance, and a design problem. The prompt treated dirt carefully, asking how urban homes might make space for microbial life that human immune systems have always lived alongside.

The study Graeme described used a hand-turned oak artifact inoculated with a soil-origin microbial extract from Finland. London renters who were already inclined toward antibacterial cleaning lived with the object for six weeks, cared for it, misted it, and kept diaries about what it felt like to maintain a living microbial presence in the home.

Verification became the most interesting barrier. Disgust mattered less than the harder question of evidence. If the bacteria are invisible, how does someone know whether the object is working? How does someone know whether they are caring for it properly? How does an object ask for attention without becoming a medical device, a wellness subscription, or another quantified-self dashboard?

So then one wonders: what kind of artifact(s) can shift a household practice?

Then we started talking about “care.”

People in the study anthropomorphized the microbial object, placed it near plants, worried about whether it was lonely, and folded its care into watering rituals. Several people suggested that the strongest route might be grafting microbial care onto existing behaviors: plants, doorknobs, phone cases, toilet pucks, cleaning cloths, kitchen surfaces, or other ordinary touch points.

Sabrina connected the work to holobionts, microbiomes, and the question of what counts as human when bacteria, fungi, and viruses are already part of the body. Mateusz brought in a Radiolab episode about parasites and asked whether microbial exposure could arrive through familiar routines rather than through biohacking. Shreya connected it to ethnographic research on cleaning practices across homes, cultures, surfaces, pets, allergies, and different sensory definitions of clean.

Sebastian talked about growing up in Mexico, eating with his hands, playing in dirt, and later noticing Canadian norms around shoes indoors. Brandel pushed on stasis: the modern wish that a home or object might remain in the same condition, even though living environments are always moving through states of renewal, decay, care, and repair.

Rick opened another thread: the discovery of bacteria as the discovery of an invading genus, and cleanliness as a kind of micro-war. That language made the whole conversation funnier and stranger. The chat moved through “controlled rotting,” “the politics of decay,” “dirty vampires,” “dirt-infused things,” “soil sommeliers,” “microbiota KPIs,” moss phone covers, and the possibility of a microbial cafe next to a cat cafe.

The jokes mattered because they exposed the cultural load of cleanliness. Lysol, Dettol, Domestos, Listerine, chlorine, Fabuloso, and the smell of the YMCA pool all showed up as memory objects. These products trained households to associate safety, virtue, gender, class, and care with the smell and promise of killing nearly everything.

Graeme was careful about the line between helpful microbial diversity and real risk. Some bacteria are harmful. Some people are immunocompromised. Some public-health victories should not be casually undone. The question is more subtle: how might homes cultivate more diverse microbial conditions while still protecting vulnerable people and avoiding the old “kill 99.9%” story?

That brought the conversation to patina and evidence. If a beneficial microbial surface changes color, stains, scratches, or gathers wear, can that become a sign of life rather than a sign of failure? Brandel compared it to leather, watches, stainless-steel counters, and other objects where care and use become visible over time. Graeme named this as verification anxiety: people may need an object to show that something is happening, while the visible sign still has to avoid the yuck factor.

The chat and discussion also widened toward rewilding. Beavers in West London, missing insects on windshields, soil tasting, Gabby’s Grounded Wisdom, Sporesight, toxoplasma, cordyceps, and Kevin Slavin’s Ignite talk all became adjacent reference points. Rewilding works as a story because people can see beavers, insects, moss, soil, plants, and changing landscapes. The microbial home needs an equivalent narrative that makes invisible relations easier to notice and care for.

The final stretch turned to scale. An open-source, local, maker-network version of microbial domestic objects is attractive because it feels participatory and situated. Large cleaning and consumer-goods companies already have scale, distribution, and the ability to change household defaults. The uncomfortable question is whether those companies can reduce harm without turning microbial diversity into another premium wellness category for people who need it least.

Graeme’s project studies the domestic imagination after a century of anti-microbial advertising. It asks what kinds of objects, rituals, signs, smells, surfaces, and care practices might help people live with microbial life again, with more specificity and less panic.

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