Back to nature

Nature holds many answers

Where to go for new concepts and ideas on product development and innovation? What will be the innovations of the next years? Let me first ask another question: where have experiments been going on for millions of years and where did, from all those experiments, only the fittest survive? The answer, of course, is in nature.

Valuing nature

Nature is an unlimited source of ideas, solutions, processes, products, tissue and resources. We have been using it as ‘predators’, taking what we humans want when we need it. Over the last two centuries we have built our own technology.

In chemistry, for example, we discovered processes with which to create the most complex molecules that can be used in all kinds of applications. And yes, they had side effects, by-products and pollutants so we started to solve this issue with even more research, more complex processes, doing things smarter and better. Our world became polluted, and we turned away from nature to create our own urban ecosystem.

The last decade saw the development of a new discipline in science and technology, ‘biomimicry’. This is a new way of viewing and valuing nature, based not on what we can extract from nature but on what we can learn from it, or in the words of Dayna Baumeister Ph.D: “Biomimicry is a conscious emulation of nature’s genius”.

Get inspired by nature

Going back to nature, not just to copy or reproduce what is found, but also to truly understand how it works, what the fundamentals are and how they can be used for solutions that we are looking for, orproducts which we want to design.

In nature, you can find materials that are strong, flexible, water/ice resistant, impact resistant, antibacterial, of any shape, any colour, soft, selfcleaning, light-weight, slip/non-slip, responsive, biodegradable, self-repairing and more. These are allqualities modern product designers are looking for. When looking at nature, we can look at the form (appearance), the process or a complete ecosystem. Form has been an inspiration for humans, for centuries. Who doesn’t know about the sticky glue used for post-its, for example? The processes in an anthill or a beehive, for instance, start to give us insight in our own complex processes, such as crowd control and non-hierarchical organisations. Our insight into ecosystems has recently been used to study our own financial system as a business ecosystem.

Sustainability

Going back to nature means being true to nature. This has resulted in a set of design principals:

•  Be attuned and responsive at a local level; use readily available materials and energy and cultivate cooperative relationships; leveragecyclic  processes, use feedback loops.
•  Adapt to changing controls; maintain integrity through self-renewal; embody resilience through variation, redundancy, and decentralization  and incorporate diversity.
•  Evolve to survive; replicate strategies that work; integrate the unexpected and reshuffle information.
•  Use life-friendly chemistry; build selectively with a small subset of elements, break down products into benign constituents and do water-  based chemistry.
•  Use material and energy efficiently; apply multifunctional design, use low energy processes, recycle all materials and fit form to function.
•  Integrate development with growth; combine modular and nested components and build from the bottom up.

Where to start with biomimicry?

To help you start researching biomimicry, we provide you with some valuable sources. Look for videos on biomimicry.net or, better still just start by askingnature on asknature.org.

Videos

TED Talk: Biomimicry in action, by Janine Banyus

Search engine key word

Biomimicry, Dayna Baumeister, biomimicry 3.8