Mr Richard Beckett

Research summary

Probiotic Design: Probiotic design is concerned with human-microbe relationships in the built environment. It explores the ecological importance of microbial diversity and their ability to configure healthy environments and bodies through effects on immunoregulatory function. In the absence of these regulatory entanglements, bodies and environments are being tipped into dysfunctional states. Dysbiotic urban populations are marked by missing microbes as a result of antibiotic mentalities dominating how we plan and shape our cities.

The symbiotic relationship between humans and microbes forms the basis of these experimental approaches that seek to re-deploy environmental microbial communities in indoor environments. These approaches aim to secure the desired ecological functions of diverse environmental microbes through built interventions that create ecological conditions and biological niches that support their presence and augment their flourishing. This approach enrols the contemporary scientific figure of the human as a holobiont to underpin these probiotic design practices that recalibrate human-microbe entanglements in buildings.

Probiotic design differentiates between pathogenic and benign microbes but also considers that microbes may not be inherently good or bad, instead it understands that such distinctions may be configurable by the relationship between bodies and their environmental context.  In this way probiotic design does not fully reject antibiotic approaches, instead it recalibrates them with approaches that limit harmful microbial exposures but crucially allow for and permit other benign exposures.

SYN.DE.BIO (co-edited with Marcos Cruz) is a forum that disseminates bio-digital work in the emerging crossroad of design, biology and engineering. It promotes a new network of designers, artists and scientists who employ novel design methods and innovative fabrication techniques to explore biological material in the built environment. Advances in the field of synthetic biology, biotechnology, molecular engineering and material sciences, as well as new modes of production and simulation in architecture, product and textile design, are leading towards an increasing complex approach to design. The result is a new sense of materiality, new hybrid technologies and unprecedented living forms.

Novel Digital Fabrication Techniques: Exploration and production of design projects using novel additive layer manufacturing, and 7 axis robotic manufacturing. Ranging in scale from textiles to be worn on the body, to architectural facades this work aims to disrupt the notion of 3D printing as a prototype or model scale activity. A body of work entitled digital stone has explored digital fabrication of stones and marbles within the context of digital architecture applied to traditional masonry concepts of blockwork, tiles, cladding or facings.

New Materials:

i. Digital Materiality. Emerging additive layer systems now afford the ability to design below the macroscopic scale. This work has focused on the design of new, hybrid materials in which every element of their properties can be prescribed at the design concept. This is towards a new architecture which encompasses a scalar hierarchy of matter involving the concurrent design at a range of scales.

ii. Design of materials for additive manufacturing including 3D printed Ceramics (patent pending) and 3D printed cements.

iii. Design of bioreceptive materials for microbiological colonisation. Laboratory based physical and chemical manipulation of materials to achieve key physical properties at the inter-facial layer between material and environment.

Education

University College London

Other higher degree, Master of Architecture | 2011

University of Westminster

First Degree, Bachelor of Architecture | 2008

Publications

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