better world by design

inspirations from nature... BIOMIMICRY


"The more our world functions like the natural world, the more likely we are to endure on this home that is ours, but not ours alone."
~ Janine Benyus

Although I wasn’t able to attend this weekend’s Better World by Design conference, I was looking through the resources to learn as much about the contents of the conference as possible. Eventually I ended up in the website http://asknature.org/ looking at the question “How would a butterfly inspire your next design?” This made me smile, because I knew that it wasn’t necessarily talking about the aesthetics of a butterfly, it was rather talking about looking at a butterfly to invent Innovation inspired by nature because “nature has already solved many of the problems we are grappling with. Animals, plants, and microbes are the consummate engineers. They have found what works, what is appropriate, and most important, what lasts here on Earth.” The science where the nature’s solutions are imitated to solve human problems is called Biomimicry.

Biomimicry is a subject that I have been recently exposed to in my advanced studio “Reactive Matter” and have been amazed by it ever since. The course description for the class started with answering this question “How would a butterfly inspire your next design?” and it was mainly the reason why I was so intrigued to take this class. So, for example the international governing body of swimming, FINA has rules which limit technologies the competitors can use in an Olympic pool. However, new Speedo LZR RACER swimsuit made use of the hydrophobic property of the wings of certain butterflies so that the suits drag less and Olympic swimmers can swim faster than previous records. This is one of many examples of biomimicry. Biomimicry is more importantly used to come up with new ways to solve green and environmental challenges which is really impressive. I think it is incredibly wise to imitate the nature to solve our design problems and I think that these websites about biomimicry are great access sources for visuals and case studies to inspire me in my design solutions. The website asknature.org even has a search bar starting with the sentence "How would nature..." to provide us with inspirations from nature.

Check out the websites below for more information on biomimicry:
http://asknature.org/
www.biomimicryinstitute.org