the dynamically interdependent elements of buildings, their occupants, and the larger environment. Rather than viewing buildings as inanimate or static objects, building ecologist Hal Levin views them as interfaces or intersecting domains of living and non-living systems. The microbial ecology of the indoor environment is strongly dependent on the building materials, occupants, contents, environmental context and the indoor and outdoor climate. The strong relationship between atmospheric chemistry and indoor air quality and the chemical reactions occurring indoors. The chemicals may be nutrients, neutral or biocides for the microbial organisms. The microbes produce chemicals that affect the building materials and occupant health and well-being. Humans manipulate the ventilation, temperature and humidity to achieve comfort with the concomitant effects on the microbes that populate and evolve. Eric Bonabeau's attempt to define emergent phenomena is through traffic: "traffic jams are actually very complicated and mysterious. On an individual level, each driver is trying to get somewhere and is following (or breaking) certain rules, some legal (the speed limit) and others societal or personal (slow down to let another driver change into your lane). But a traffic jam is a separate and distinct entity that emerges from those individual behaviors. Gridlock on a highway, for example, can travel backward for no apparent reason, even as the cars are moving forward." He has also likened emergent phenomena to the analysis of market trends and employee behavior. Computer AI Some artificially intelligent (AI) computer applications simulate emergent behavior. One example is Boids, which mimics the swarming behavior of birds. Language It has been argued that the structure and regularity of language grammar, or at least language change, is an emergent phenomenon. While each speaker merely tries to reach their own communicative goals, they use language in a particular way. If enough speakers behave in that way, language is changed. In a wider sense, the norms of a language, i.e. the linguistic conventions of its speech society, can be seen as a system emerging from long-time participation in communicative problem-solving in various social circumstances. Emergent change processes Within the field of group facilitation and organization development, there have been a number of new group processes that are designed to maximize emergence and self-organization, by offering a minimal set of effective initial conditions. Examples of these processes include SEED-SCALE, appreciative inquiry, Future Search, the world cafe or knowledge cafe, Open Space Technology, and others (Holman, 2010). See also