The Probiotic Interface: Designing with Atmosphere, Material and Microbial Life

You are cordially invited to attend the lecture by Wei Hangchuan:

Date: 14 Oct 2026
Time: 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM
Venue: SDE3 Level 4, LT421

The Probiotic Interface: Designing with Atmosphere, Material and Microbial Life

We spend most of our lives indoors, among microbial communities that buildings have long been designed to remove. Research in microbiology now suggests that over-sanitised interiors reduce beneficial microbes and favour resistant ones. My research asks how architecture can respond to the microbiome through design, and so shape a healthier built environment. Using airflow as an example, I translate atmospheric conditions into architectural form, fabricate that form through robotic clay printing, and test it in collaboration with microbiologists. The talk follows this work across scales, from a ceramic surface, to a wall component, to the installation Probiotic Intervention exhibited at the London Design Biennale 2025, and then to ongoing work on a full wall system for a building in use. I will then discuss how this agenda could develop in Singapore, where humidity, natural ventilation and porous envelopes make the relationship between buildings and microbial life both more urgent and more open to design. I will close by reflecting on what this work offers to research through design in the tropics.

Hangchuan Wei is a PhD candidate at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. His research, developed within an EPSRC-funded project on probiotic interventions in the built environment, combines computational design, robotic clay printing and environmental sensing to create architectural surfaces that support beneficial indoor microbial communities. His installation Probiotic Intervention was exhibited in the Living Assembly Pavilion at the London Design Biennale 2025, which received a Special Mention, and his work has also been shown at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center in Athens, Roca London Gallery and California College of the Arts.

He has taught design studio and computational design at the Bartlett since 2023, and student projects he instructed received medals at the Bartlett Autumn Show in 2024 and 2025. He has also co-led international workshops at CAADRIA 2026 and DigitalFUTURES 2026. He is a Visiting Fellow at the Global Centre for Clean Air Research, University of Surrey, and an External Lecturer at the University of Innsbruck. He holds an MArch with Distinction from the Bartlett and a BArch from Zhejiang University.