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Biomimicry- Research Notes - Google Docs

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Biomimicry- Research Notes - Google Docs

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What is biomimicry?
How has biomimicry evolved over time?
What are some examples of biomimicry in action in our daily lives?

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How a kingfisher, an owl, & a penguin helped redesign Japan’s Shinkansen | The Kid Should See This

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How a kingfisher, an owl, & a penguin helped redesign Japan’s Shinkansen | The Kid Should See This

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How is Japan's Shinkansen, a long-nosed bullet train that travels up to 240-320 km/h (150-200 mph), like a kingfisher? Or an owl? Or an Adélie penguin? In this video from Vox and 99% Invisible, we see how these three birds influenced the 1989 redesign of this high speed train with the help of birdwatching and biomimicry.

Earlier models were rounder and louder, often suffering from the phenomenon of "tunnel boom," where deafening compressed air would rush out of a tunnel after a train rushed in. But a moment of inspiration from engineer and birdwatcher Eiji Nakatsu led the system to be redesigned based on the aerodynamics of three species of birds.

Nakatsu's case is a fascinating example of biomimicry, the design movement pioneered by biologist and writer Janine Benyus. It's the idea that big challenges in design, engineering, and sustainability have often been solved before through 3.8 billion years of evolution on earth. We just have to go out and find them.

The video is chock full of excellent ways that we can learn from prairie dog burrows, shark skin, lotus leaves, ecosystems, and more. Related reading: Circular economies.

We love biomimicry and the solutions that it can yield. Watch these videos next: Think Like a Tree - Problem solving with nature's best ideas, mimicking shark skin to combat superbugs, How Ingenious Animals Have Engineered Air Conditioning, and can Namib Desert beetles help us solve our drought problems?

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How a kingfisher, an owl, & a penguin helped redesign Japan's Shinkansen

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How is Japan's Shinkansen, a long-nosed bullet train that travels up to 240-320 km/h (150-200 mph), like a kingfisher? Or an owl? Or an Adélie penguin?

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Biomimicry
Bullet trains
Biomimicry examples/history
Inventions

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What Is Biomimicry? – Biomimicry Institute

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What Is Biomimicry? – Biomimicry Institute

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For all the challenges we face, nature has a solution.

Biomimicry offers an empathetic, interconnected understanding of how life works and ultimately where we fit in. It is a practice that learns from and mimics the strategies used by species alive today. After billions years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what remains hold the secret to our survival. The goal is to create products, processes, and systems-new ways of living-that solve our greatest design challenges sustainably and in solidarity with all life on earth. We can use biomimicry to not only learn from nature's wisdom, but also heal ourselves-and this planet-in the process.

Biomimicry provides the blueprints that can be adapted across context, industries, and be scalable to address the needs. See examples of biomimicry in action.

The 3 Essential Elements of Biomimicry

When translating nature's strategies into design, the science of the practice involves three essential elements: Emulate, Ethos, and (Re)Connect. These three components are infused in every aspect of biomimicry and represent these core values at its essence.
Emulate
The scientific, research-based practice of learning from and then replicating nature's forms, processes, and ecosystems to create more regenerative designs.
Ethos
The philosophy of understanding how life works and creating designs that continuously support and create conditions conducive to life.
(Re)Connect
The concept that we are nature and find value in connecting to our place on Earth as part of life's interconnected systems. (Re)Connect as a practice encourages us to observe and spend time in nature to understand how life works so that we may have a better ethos to emulate biological strategies in our designs.

Why learn from nature?

We have the innate potential to create a world that is harmonious, regenerative, and supports the well-being of all Life. As a young species, we are fortunate enough to have guidance to help us rise to this challenge. Our planet-mates, the fantastic meshwork of plants, animals, and microbes, have done billions of years of research and development. By infusing biological strategies in design, we can transform sustainable innovation.

Biomimicry brings relief.

We're stressed. Our planet is stressed. Many are losing hope for solving the climate crisis and its many negative effects on ecosystems across the world. Biomimicry gives us hope, because we know the solutions are here, accessible, and validated by the many species contributing to their ecosystems today. By using nature as our mentor, we experience the powerful healing effects it has by connecting to the natural world-while also finding empowering relief to solve these challenges together.

Biomimicry gets us to sustainable solutions, faster.

Our R&D cycles are slow, and climate change won't wait-we must look to the biological blueprints that have been successful over millennia to launch groundbreaking ideas, faster. We don't need to reinvent the strategies that are already here. We just need to learn how to adapt them. We believe the next generation wants to help solve these problems-they don't just want to protest. We can equip learners of all ages to see science as a vehicle for addressing access and equity, building literacy and mathematical skills, and for sense-making about their place in the world.

Biomimicry is generous.

Circularity, sustainability, regenerative design-it means that the things we humans make become a force for restoring air, water, and soil instead of degrading it. Nature uses structure to perform functions and passive forms of energy, whereas our inventions have typically used brute force, like mining ancient carbon and harmful chemicals. We can create conditions conducive to life, just like nature does. Everything we do must model how nature offers reciprocity and abundance for a diversity of life to flourish.

Biomimicry changes the lens in which we view the world.

Innovators turn to biomimicry with the hope of achieving a unique product that is efficient and effective, but they often gain a deep appreciation of and connection to the natural world. Biomimicry encourages conservation for ecosystems and its inhabitants, because they hold the knowledge we need to survive and thrive. When we view the world as deeply interconnected, we gain empathy and better knowledge on how to make decisions that invites a global collaboration that supports the future of all species.

Biomimicry is one type of bioinspired design, but not all bioinspired design is biomimicry.

"Bioinspired design" is a term that is generally accepted as an umbrella category for design and engineering approaches, including biomimicry, that use biology as a resource for solutions. While biomimicry is a type of bioinspired design, not all bioinspired design is biomimicry. An important factor that differentiates biomimicry from other bio-inspired design approaches is the emphasis on learning from and emulating the regenerative solutions living systems have for specific functional challenges.

Within the family of bioinspired design, a common misunderstanding that we encounter is mistaking biomorphism for biomimicry. Biomorphism refers to designs that visually resemble elements from life (they "look like" nature), whereas biomimetic designs focus on function (they "work like" nature). Biomorphic designs can be very beautiful and beneficial, in part because humans have a natural affinity for nature and natural forms. But it's important to realize that "looking like" nature is not a reliable indicator of biomimetic design because a biomimetic design might or might not look anything like the organisms that inspired it. Rather, the important indicator is function.

A similar point of confusion occurs between bioutilization and biomimicry. Bioutilization refers to the use of biological material or living organisms in a design or technology. For example, using trees as a material (wood) for furniture or a living wall of plants to help clean the air in an office building is bioutilization. Bioutilization can be beneficial-organisms can do a lot of things we can't-and biomimetic designs sometimes incorporate bioutilization for this reason. However, just because a designer consults a living organism for a solution to a problem or uses a natural material, it does not mean the design is biomimetic. The distinctive feature of biomimicry is the study and emulation of functional strategies to create sustainable solutions that also embody the (re)connect and ethos elements.

Read more about differentiating biomimicry from other similar disciplines here:

Discover nature's solutions and genius through books, articles, videos, lesson plans, groups, training programs, and more, and the ideas they've inspired with this powerful, free online tool.

This free resource introduces a set of biomimicry tools and core concepts that can help problem-solvers from any discipline begin to incorporate insights from nature into their solutions.

Explore solutions inspired by nature, including water, energy, agricultural, public health, and carbon capture solutions, developed by current and past program participants.

What might you learn after 30 days of observing and learning from the natural world? Explore some of our favorite biomimicry activities that can be done virtually or outside in nature.

Nature Inspired Solutions to Minimize Food Waste.

Enabling Precision Recovery of Resources from Nature.

Redesigning Textiles for a Circular Economy.

Allowing Nature to Lead Innovation, Revolutionize Construction, and Create Sustainably-Built Environments.

We will use the information to be in touch with you via email. You can change your mind at any time by clicking the unsubscribe link in the footer of any message you receive from us. Learn more about our privacy practices here.

Support the Next Generation
of Nature-Inspired Innovators

Imagine a world where everything we make is inspired by the natural world. By supporting the Biomimicry Institute you:

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What Is Biomimicry? - Biomimicry Institute

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Biomimicry is a practice that learns from and mimics the strategies found in nature to solve human design challenges-and find hope.

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How Biomimicry is Inspiring Human Innovation | The Kid Should See This

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How Biomimicry is Inspiring Human Innovation | The Kid Should See This

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How Biomimicry is Inspiring Human Innovation:

...we human beings, who have been trying to make things for only the blink of an evolutionary eye, have a lot to learn from the long processes of natural selection, whether it's how to make a wing more aerodynamic or a city more resilient or an electronic display more vibrant... one of the most often-cited examples is Velcro, which the Swiss engineer Georges de Mestral patented in 1955 after studying how burs stuck to his clothes...

And the butterflies?

More than a decade ago, an MIT grad named Mark Miles was dabbling in the field of micro-electromechanical and materials processing. As he paged through a science magazine, he was stopped by an article on how butterflies generate color in their wings. The brilliant iridescent blue of the various Morpho species, for example, comes not from pigment, but from "structural color." Those wings harbor a nanoscale assemblage of shingled plates, whose shape and distance from one another are arranged in a precise pattern that disrupts reflective light wavelengths to produce the brilliant blue. To create that same blue out of pigment would require much more energy-energy better used for flying, feeding and reproducing.

Miles wondered if this capability could be exploited in some way. Where else might you want incredibly vivid color in a thin package?

From Smithsonian Mag.

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How Biomimicry is Inspiring Human Innovation | The Kid Should See This

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Smart videos for curious minds of all ages: Science, art, nature, animals, space, technology, DIY, food, music, animation, and more! The Kid Should See This is a free video resource for parents, teachers, and kids of all ages. Watch a huge collection of high-quality, kid-friendly, age appropriate, educational videos together at home, during homeschool, or in the classroom.

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Submarines of the future speed through the water with the help of wiggling fish fins. Aircraft ascend through the clouds with flapping wings. In the desert, a climber steadily approaches the summit of a cliff, open palms effortlessly sticking to rock with the use of gecko-inspired nanotechnology. You've probably only encountered such nature-inspired future technologies in the imagined worlds of science fiction and comic books, but the design approach already exists. Inventors and engineers have been looking to nature for inspiration ever since prehistoric times.

Early humans learned hunting, shelter and survival techniques by observing animals as they interacted with their surroundings. While humans lacked the fierce claws and superior hunting instinct of bears, people could mimic their techniques. And as humans began to design ever-more complicated contraptions, they continued to look to nature's example. From Leonardo da Vinci's 15th-century sketches of flying machines to the Wright brothers' first successful prototype four centuries later, dreams of human flight centered on observing birds.

The world is full of amazing biological innovations, each one the product of millions of years of evolution. When designing technologies, it only makes sense to study the ways in which nature has already mastered the challenges involved. Today, we know this as biomimetics or biomimicry -- the practice of imitating models in nature to create better forms, processes, systems and strategies.

You encounter examples of biomimicry every day, perhaps without even realizing it. Velcro technology, for instance, was inspired by the way burred seed pouches cling to animal fur. Modern hypodermic needles take a few pointers from rattlesnake fangs. Nike has even applied the qualities of goat hoof traction to their running shoe designs.

In this article, we'll explore the ways in which biomimicry bridges the disciplines of biology and engineering, using the innovations of the natural world to improve technology and design.

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Submarines of the future speed through the water with the help of wiggling fish fins. Aircraft ascend through the clouds with flapping wings. In the desert, a climber steadily approa­ches the summit of a cliff, open palms effortlessly sticking to rock with the use of gecko-inspired nanotechnology.

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Biomimetics - An introduction to textiles inspired by nature

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Biomimetics - An introduction to textiles inspired by nature

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by Chris Woodford. Last updated: September 13, 2017.

Nature is nothing if not surprising. You could spend your whole life learning the wonders of wildflowers, migratory birds, or creatures of the seashore and still discover only a fraction of the things the living world has to offer. Though nature is fascinating in its own right, it can also teach us many ways of improving our own lives; indeed, it's been a constant source of inspiration for inventors. Now fashion designers and clothing manufacturers are also turning to nature for help developing "biomimetic clothes"-ones that perform more effectively by mimicking the wonders of the biological world.

Photo: Now that's what I call a fur coat! Can animals like these musk oxen inspire us to design warmer human clothes? That's what biomimetics is all about. Photo of musk oxen on Nunivak Island by courtesy of US Fish & Wildlife Service.

What lessons can we learn from nature?

When a German engineer called Otto Lilienthal (1848-1896) strapped wings to his arms and jumped off a hill in an attempt to fly, many people thought he was crazy. They had a point: he did, eventually, kill himself trying to fly like the birds. But his pioneering glider experiments inspired the Wright brothers to develop their engine-powered airplanes in the early 20th century and played a hugely important part in the history of human flight.

Photo: Reinventing flight: Biomimetics doesn't always work. To begin with, humans tried to fly by flapping wings like birds. People only successfully took to the air when they thought about the problem a different way and stopped copying nature so literally. The Wright brothers making their historic powered flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina in December 1903. Photo courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

Lilienthal the "birdman" is only one example of how nature has inspired inventors. How about the story of British engineer Marc Isambard Brunel (1769-1845), father of famous engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-1859), who invented a new way of digging tunnels underwater after watching a worm burrowing through the wooden planks of a ship? Or what about Swiss engineer George de Mestral (1907-1990), who invented the amazingly useful fastening material called VELCRO® after seeing how stray burrs from the burdock plant stuck like glue to the fur of his dog.

Photo: VELCRO®: George de Mestral's amazingly useful two-part textile fastener was directly inspired by nature. This is a diagram of the hook-and-loop mechanism sketched in his original patent US Patent 3,009,235: Separable fastening device (filed 1958, granted 1961). Artwork courtesy of US Patent and Trademark Office.

Before synthetic textiles such as nylon and polyester were developed in the 20th century, people only ever wore clothes made from natural materials like leather, wool, silk, and cotton. Now synthetic fibers have proved useful in all kinds of ways. Nylon, for example, is strong, hard-wearing, easy to clean, and quick-drying-so it's a popular choice for outdoor clothing. But wearing simple, ordinary nylon is a bit like wrapping yourself up in a plastic bag. Very quickly, you start to sweat-and on a hot, rainy summer's day you can easily become wetter through perspiration than you would have done just by letting the rain in. Natural materials like leather are much "smarter" than this: they let perspiration flow out but stop rain leaking in at the same time. What makes us think our synthetic materials are automatically better than the ones we can find in the world around us? Honed by millions of years of evolution, nature's materials have many lessons they can teach us.

How can soggy sheep keep you warm?

If you've ever gone walking on a mountain in winter, you've probably marveled at how sheep can survive in damp, cold, and utterly horrible conditions. The explanation is simple: wool is an amazingly good insulating material. The best wool of all comes from a breed of sheep called the merino; that's why sportswear companies use it in their high-performance base layers (insulating underwear for active sports like climbing, cycling, and surfing).

Photo: Sheep are built to stay warm, even when they're wet.

Several brilliant features make merino the perfect thermal underwear for sheep. First, it has much finer fibers than ordinary wool. Finer fibers means more fibers and more air trapped between them. It's trapped air that gives you warmth in clothing (that's why wearing several thin layers is generally warmer than wearing one thick pullover). You can also fluff up the surface of merino so the fibers occupy more space and trap even more air-giving more thickness and insulation with no added weight. All dry wool (and merino wool in particular) has an amazing ability to mop up steamy moisture from inside it and merino can absorb over a third of its own dry weight in water. As perspiration soaks into the fiber, it turns from a gas to a liquid, giving off what's called latent heat of fusion. The water molecules actually lock onto the wool fibers making chemical (hydrogen) bonds with them. Bonded molecules are more stable than unbonded ones, so the chemical bonding process releases energy, giving off what's called heat of sorption that keeps you warm. That's significantly different from what happens with synthetic fibers. If you wear polyester clothes and you sweat, the sweat will evaporate from your skin and cool your body down, which probably isn't too helpful if you're climbing a mountain in midwinter. But if you're wearing a merino base layer and you start to sweat, the merino will lock away the moisture and give off heat as it gets wetter, helping to keep you warm.

Will clothes ever clean themselves?

Photo: The leaves of the lotus plant (Nelumbo nucifera) are self-cleaning. Photo taken in the Wichita Mountains National Wildlife Refuge by Elise Smith, courtesy of US Fish & Wildlife Service.

One of the most irritating things about clothes is that you have to keep washing them to keep them clean. Animals wash, clean, and preen themselves too-but you don't often see plants doing the same thing. That's because some plants, like the lotus, have a clever built-in mechanism that naturally keeps them clean. The leaves are coated with nanoscopically tiny bumps and the bumps are, themselves, covered with a thin layer of wax. Dirt particles balance precariously on the waxy bumps but never get a really good grip on the main surface of the leaves below. When it rains, water droplets roll down the leaves, pulling the dirt particles free and washing them clean. The nano-bumps work a bit like a natural detergent, holding dirt clear of the leaves so water can easily wash it away. Surprise, surprise, clothing manufacturers are now coating garments like skate pants with nanofibers so they work in a similar way. The idea is that dirt is held slightly apart from the main fabric so stains cannot penetrate deeply; clothes coated with nanofibers can be washed clean much more easily.

Why does it help to swim like a shark?

Skin is an amazing material: it's waterproof, it's breathable, it helps to regulate our body temperature, and it can repair itself automatically. One thing it was never designed for was swimming. Water doesn't flow well past human skin-not least because our skin starts to wrinkle (by absorbing water) after we've been swimming or bathing for some time. If you have a particularly hairy body, every single one of your hairs will drag and slow you down even more.

Photo: Unlike humans, sharks are designed to slip easily through water. Photo of navy divers and sharks at the Newport Aquarium, Kentucky, by Davis Anderson, courtesy of US Navy.

Now you might think super-smooth suits would work better than rough ones as you swim through the pool, but the Speedo company's Fiona Fairhurst noticed something surprising: sharks have quite rough skin and still manage to swim fast. That was one of the key insights that powered the development of a revolutionary new Speedo swimsuit. Known as FASTSKIN®, the tight-fitting suit is covered with tiny v-shaped channels, just like the ridges (technically known as placoid scales or dermal denticles) on a shark's body. The idea is that water whizzes along these channels, reducing the frictional drag (essentially, turbulence) between the water and your skin, so you can swim faster.

Another of Fairhurst's important insights was to realize that a swimsuit could be engineered to force a swimmer's body into a more effective posture. So Speedo's suits fit very tightly, squeezing your body into a shape that reduces form drag (the basic resistance that the shape of an object offers as it pushes through water or air). Compressing muscles helps to reduce fatigue, so the suits also help you swim faster for longer. According to Speedo, swimsuits like this can boost a swimmer's speed by up to 3 percent. It's hardly surprising that many champion swimmers now wear suits like these. At the 2004 Sydney Olympics, swimmers kitted out in FASTSKIN earned an impressive 47 medals!

Why should clothes work like pine cones?

Photo: Pine cones naturally close in wet weather and open up in dry conditions. Something as simple as this could inspire new clothing designs.

You probably know an easy way to tell the weather. Get a pine cone and watch whether the spines open and close. If it's going to rain, the spines close up to protect the seeds inside; if it's going to stay dry, the spines open up to improve the chances of the seeds escaping. Researchers at England's Bath University and the London College of Fashion are trying to design biomimetic clothes that could work the same way. The fabric could be made with an outer layer of tiny spikes, only 1/200th of a millimeter wide. When it's hot, the spikes would open up to let out the heat, cooling you down. When it's cold, the spikes would flatten back down to trap air and provide more effective insulation.

And tomorrow?

Tomorrow, we could all be wearing clothes based on shark skin, merino wool, pine cones, or a thousand other naturally good ideas. Getting back to nature has never been more worthwhile-or more fun!

Find out more

On this website

Books

Biomimetics for Designers: Applying Nature's Processes & Materials in the Real World by Veronika Kapsali. Thames and Hudson, 2016. A more design-oriented guide.

Potentials and Trends in Biomimetics by Arnim von Gleich, Christian Pade, Ulrich Petschow, and Eugen Pissarskoi. Springer, 2014. Reviews biomimetic trends in materials science, robotics, medicine, and other areas.

Engineered Biomimicry by Akhlesh Lakhtakia and Raul Jose Martin-Palma (eds). Newnes, 2013. From VELCRO and artificial muscles to robots inspired by nature and modified surfaces, this book reviews cutting-edge research in biomimetics.

Biomimetic and Bioinspired Nanomaterials by Challa S. S. R. Kumar (ed). Wiley-VCH, 2010. A collection of scientific papers reviewing a wide range of bio-inspired nanotechnology materials and their everyday applications.

Biologically Inspired Textiles by Albert G. Abbott and Michael Ellison (eds). CRC Press, 2008. Reviews the basic idea of biomimetics and the production of biomimetic materials, before considering a variety of clothing and other textile applications.

Articles

Biomimetics: Borrowing from Biology by Becky Poole, The Naked Scientists, July 2007. A nice introduction to the whole topic of biomimetics. Includes lots of stuff about gecko adhesives and self-cleaning lotus flowers.

Biomimetics: The Economist, June 9, 2005. A general review of biomimetics and the technological benefits it might bring.

Eluding the enemy by Peter Forbes. The Guardian, 16 January 2003. How military clothing uses biomimetic inspiration to improve camouflage.

Patents

US Patent: 6,446,264: Multi-functional animal garment that reacts to changing temperatures and activities by Jan Antoinette Buehner, 15 May 2008. A textile that opens and closes to allow heat and moisture to escape, much like an opening and closing pine cone.

US Patent: 6,446,264: Articles of Clothing by Fiona Fairhurst et al, Speedo International Limited, 10 September 2002. One of the Speedo FASTSKIN patents for a swimsuit contoured to match key muscle groups.

US Patent: 4,972,522: Garment including elastic fabric having a grooved outer surface by Leonard J. Rautenberg, 27 November 1990. An early patent describing how roughened fabrics can improve the performance of a swimmer.

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Biomimetics - An introduction to textiles inspired by nature

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by Chris Woodford. Last updated: September 13, 2017. Nature is nothing if not surprising. You could spend your whole life learning the wonders of wildflowers, migratory birds, or creatures of the seashore and still discover only a fraction of the things the living world has to offer.

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The world’s best creative director: Nature |

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The world’s best creative director: Nature |

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What's that too-often quoted aphorism? "Good artists copy; great artists steal"? In this nuanced conversation, biologist and founder of Biomimicry 3.8 Janine Benyus speaks with Tim Brown, chief executive of IDEO, to discuss what's really interesting about borrowing.

Tim Brown: As a creative person, I've always believed that I can't be creative unless I'm inspired in some way. Inspiration is a funny thing; it sounds like it's an internal thing. We think of great creative artists and imagine that inspiration wells up inside of them, but I think that's just not true. Inspiration comes from the outside. The most inspirational people are the most observant people who are able to take from the outside world and convert what they see into something that drives their creativity. The simplest and most effective way of doing that is to notice things, and to notice those things that might be relevant to the thing you're thinking about or the problem you're trying to solve or the idea that you're working with. There are countless cliche examples of this, everyone from Picasso to Leonardo, people we think of as being individually creative geniuses who in fact were extremely good at taking inspiration from the outside world and having it drive their own creative engine. Borrowing from the outside world is at the heart of all things we do creatively to be inspired.

Then, the challenges we tackle as designers are always multifaceted; they are systemic in nature, not simple. In order to tackle them with any degree of comprehension we have to look at them from a multidisciplinary perspective, look at them from many different directions, through many different lenses. So we're not just borrowing from other disciplines, we're actually applying those disciplines. I think often what we do as designers is attempt to glue a whole bunch of other disciplines together to look at something creatively. We take business, science and technology, the human disciplines of social science... I personally borrow ideas from those places, and much more importantly I am also interested in how we bring them all together as collaborators.

Janine Benyus: That feels like it goes right to the heart of it. Obviously biomimicry is borrowing nature's blueprints, recipes and processes, borrowing ecosystem strategies and then coming up with design principles to solve our own problems. When I started in this field about 15 years ago, there wasn't really a name for this method of innovating, and I remember I found that so strange. We used to live much closer to the ecosystem and when we admired species that we saw, we mimicked them. So Native Americans saw the snowshoe hare with its big back feet and made snowshoes that exactly mimicked how they allowed it to float on top of snow. So there's obviously a long history of it, but why isn't it systematized? Why isn't there, in other words, a science around this? There are very deep methodologies around learning about nature, but not about learning from nature.

So when I look at our relationship with the natural world, I think biomimicry signals something very new for western industrial culture. Our relationships with the natural world are around what we can extract, what we can harvest, what we can domesticate. Look through the literature, and we know all about crop plants and livestock, and we know about pests, things that bother us. But until recently we hadn't studied organisms so that we might learn from them. So I think it's a new relationship, and it's also one that is powerful for another reason. If you're not domesticating, harvesting, or extracting, if you're just borrowing an idea, that means the organism stays out there in the wild, and so it's the least damaging thing you can do.

TB: That expands to thinking about how we borrow and are inspired by nature's systems, those things that aren't necessarily 'living' in the traditional sense of the world. I think of the weather system, for instance, and the overlap with the science of complexity. More and more I'm seeing that we can look at, wonder about and be inspired by things from many different perspectives. One way is to look directly at the specific octopus or mollusk; another is to begin to understand some of the principles of physics from which those natural systems were built. Because unless you're of a certain religious perspective, they weren't actually designed by anybody but they emerged from complex systems in seemingly magical ways.

JB: We work with so-called life's principles. As scientists, we looked and saw all this incredible diversity: 'wow, that organism can fly at that speed and live without oxygen for three hours!' There are all those individual technologies - and 30 million species! So we wanted to know if there's anything that all or even most species have in common. Because that would be an operating manual for how to live on earth. So we began to collect them. And now we work with these principles as a filter. Some of them look at how complex adaptive systems grew to be sustainable or actually enhance their place; they're almost a buildup of rule sets. And actually, that intrigues me when I think about your work at IDEO. How do you guys make generations of products before they have to go out into the wild? You make stuff, and then you have to select what will live or die. How might things like a list of life's principles be used to choose the things that will bring us toward better adaptation on the planet? Do you think about stuff like that?

TB: Yes, we do. Not so much the principles that you're talking about, although it sounds like we should be thinking about them a lot more, but I think you bring up a very important point. The simplistic view of borrowing is that you see a solution here and you apply that solution there. And that works sometimes, but it doesn't work very often. We see this in our work when we're doing ethnographic and anthropological work. You'll see an instance of somebody doing something interesting; they're an extreme user, they're hacking the system somehow. The obvious thing is to just take that solution and apply it wherever you're looking to solve a problem. But it turns out that very rarely works. What you actually have to do is to abstract out what it is you're learning from that solution, understand what the principles are, understand perhaps what the strategies are, and then from there reformulate the right solution for the circumstances that you're talking about. This process of spotting, seeing, observing and then abstracting - and then from that abstraction being able to create multiple potential solutions - is an important subtlety when it comes to this idea of borrowing. Ideas don't just shoot across from the moment you saw an interesting new idea straight through to a solution. Instead, we go through this elevated process of abstraction to the point where we've got a set of principles through which we can design many different potential answers.

JB: Very much so! When people talk about biomimicry, they constantly ask questions like, 'why would you want reinvent things like the spider?' And that's not it at all. We look at the spider and we extract a design principle from it. Or the Namibian beetle that can create water out of fog. You're not going to recreate the shell, but you realize that there's a design principle for how to do it. It's a platform.

TB: A great example of this is the work Neri Oxman is doing at MIT. She's taking the principles of the way silkworms produce their silk, which can be both a very soft material or a very hard material, and she's exploring the kinds of things you can do by applying those principles. She's not just trying to make industrial-sized, mechanical silkworms.

JB: Exactly! And the thing that makes Neri's work really powerful is to figure out how nature makes what we call functional gradients, so you go from a piece of fiber being very stretchy to a piece of fiber being very hard. That's done with different titrations of the exact same material. So as she puts that different structure function catalog together, and you add 3D printing to the mix, suddenly you're able to dial in the function you want, using a common raw material that normally you'd think might not be strong enough. That becomes a platform for manufacturing in a new way. The thing to do now is to get deep biological catalogs in place for 3D printing.We'll do that not by looking at one organism, but by looking across, from 'amoeba through zebra.'

TB: It's interesting. This ability to move from the specific to the general through figuring out what the principles are is a fundamental part of the creative process. But it's something that's often missed when we have this discussion about how we're inspired from the outside world or how we borrow ideas.

JB: I remember being at an event in San Diego, and there were a bunch of people from biomimetic companies on a panel. One of them talked about finding a 3D Fibonacci sequence - everywhere. It's in the cochlear of your ear, it's in your veins, it's found in tree tracheids. It's how water is able to move quickly through capillaries. That shape itself is a platform technology. And so now that company can make fans, blowers, pipes that move water better... Also on the panel was a guy from Regen Energy, and he was talking about using swarm technology. He was so excited to apply that technology to other, new ideas. Once you get a platform, that's when it becomes very powerful.

TED: Tim, you've hired biologists and those with all sorts of backgrounds at IDEO. How do you integrate a few people with the depths of knowledge that Janine is describing into the company - and how do you make sure their ideas are fostered and nurtured and not just seen as a happy, interesting, weird sideline?

TB: It's actually really difficult, and I would say we're less successful than I'd like us to be, even though we keep doing it. We're not a huge organization by global standards, but we're big enough, 600 people, and when you come in with a very specific set of expertise, there's immediately a tension: 'What is the right thing to do?' Should people remain expert in what they do? In which case they're basically on their own, as there aren't other similar people in the organization. Or should they, as we say, go native and essentially turn themselves into a designer? In which case their skillset is essentially lost and certainly no longer deepening. We've run across that problem with scientists, with all kinds of people where it's unlikely that we're going to have 50 of them. The strategy, I think, and one that we have to keep working on, is you both bring people in as experts, and also build outside networks and collaborate. That's the way those experts stay deep in their field, and it's also the way we can create leverage and scale.

JB: We've gotten to that point as well, where I think we realize that we're not going to be able to stop everything and give everybody a deep knowledge of the biological world. People are not going to become biologists. What we think we need to do - and have started - is to create a "Biological Intelligence Service." The hope is to make this into a digital resource where people can look up any kind of function and come up with a lot of the biological strategies. It's early days right now, but I think we have to have biologists do something they haven't really done, which is to find patterns that then become useful as principles for design. It's the process we do for clients, but I think it has to be something that everybody can subscribe to. I want us to get to the point where we're in the tools people use every day, when biology is at that level of abstraction where it's useful. So you don't just learn that the beetle can comb water out of fog, you actually have a generative design program, an algorithm, that allows you to skin your train or your car with that particular shape, so you can wrap a building so that it too can comb water out of fog. The knowledge actually turns into a product that comes out of biological intelligence. So far in biology we've been in stamp-collecting mode; we've been very interested in cataloging the diversity of life and not that interested in cataloging its generalities. So this is new.

TB: What we also need, at least in order for designers to respond well to this, are the icons, if you like, the things that spark our imagination. And so as we begin to get designers, people like Neri, for instance, who are beginning to make exciting discoveries and expressing them in a creative, design-based way, that inspires other designers to think the same way. So it's one thing to have a library of solutions, another to have tools, algorithms, whatever else it might be that will help you match a need with a solution. Then I think we also need those things that inspire us and the examples that pull us toward this space, which means we need these crossover people. Neri's interesting because she's an architect and a scientist, so she's got both skills. Particularly in the early days, the translational difficulties that we have between designers and biologists get overcome by people who are somehow both things. They're few and far between, but when we find them, I think they play a really important role.

JB: Absolutely. They're the da Vincis.

TED: You've both been vocal about the need for both design and biomimicry to be used and applied to stop us from destroying the planet and ourselves. How do you see that movement progressing?

TB: Janine pointed at a bunch of the most interesting examples, but this idea that we might be discovering principles for making our own man-made world, and using mechanisms, principles and materials that are in themselves far more sustainable, because biology has figured out how to do that, that for me is the most exciting piece of it. There's also a piece that's harder to understand and harder to get your head around because it's much more complex, which is understanding the way that nature's systems and sustainable ecosystems actually work. That's why I think the science of complexity is so important. At the actionable level, this idea that we might be developing 3D printing materials that are both highly adaptable structurally and at the same time highly circular in their ability to be returned back to where they came from, that is where I think the great hope lies.

Of course, we've also got the rather small challenge of persuading the world's industries to completely retool the way they think about what they do. It took a couple hundred years to get to this point and we haven't got a couple hundred years to get to the next point, so that's a significant challenge. But certainly for me, even in the last couple years as I've started to see the possibilities for making in these new ways, I'm the most hopeful I've been that we might have an alternative. I'm not saying we're there yet, but this is not just about improving the state of the way we do things industrially today, but completely remaking it.

JB: I completely agree, and I think the circular economy piece is very interesting. But even once you agree that these materials are reusable, a lot of innovation has to happen everywhere along that line in order for that to happen. You have to start with materials that can be reconfigured, taken apart, unzipped - even before 3D printing comes online. We need to start thinking about the supply chain, of what we're putting in those printers. I think biomimicry has the design; the build files for those 3D printers can come from the natural world. Now we're also going to have to get nature's chemistry within those printers. And that's a huge and exciting challenge.
Note: This conversation was lightly edited. "Questions Worth Asking" is a TED editorial series; this week we asked the question, "Can I borrow that?" to dig into themes of cross-disciplinary innovation and idea-sharing. See also Seth Godin's op ed, "Why I want you to steal my ideas," a story about SkyBox Imaging, a company using unexpected technology to build a new type of satellite, and an interview with Suzanne Lee, who's mixing science, fashion and kombucha to extraordinary effect.

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The world's best creative director: Nature

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Tim Brown: As a creative person, I've always believed that I can't be creative unless I'm inspired in some way. Inspiration is a funny thing; it sounds like it's an internal thing. We think of great creative artists and imagine that inspiration wells up inside of them, but I think that's just not true.

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How Biomimicry is Inspiring Human Innovation | Science | Smithsonian

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How Biomimicry is Inspiring Human Innovation | Science | Smithsonian

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Creative minds are increasingly turning to nature-banyan tree leaves, butterfly wings, a bird's beak- for fresh design solutions

Smithsonian Magazine |

The first thing you notice about the entomology collections department, Lepidoptera division, at the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History is a faint, elusively familiar odor. Mothballs. I briefly contemplated the cosmic irony of mothballs in a room full of moths (and butterflies, a lineage of moths evolved to fly during the day) before turning to Bob Robbins, a research entomologist. "There are many insects that will eat dried insects," he said, "so traditionally you kept those pests out using naphthalene, or mothballs."

The mothballs have been phased out (in favor of freezing new specimens to kill any pests), but that lingering smell, as well as the endless drawers of insects pinned under glass and carefully arrayed in row after row of steel cabinets for taxonomic posterity, only heightens the sense of age in the hushed chamber. Time seems to stand as still as the millions of specimens.

But pore through those drawers, through the precisely spaced squadrons of swallowtails and sunset moths, and a different idea begins to form: This is not a dormant repository, but a laboratory that investigates an extraordinarily successful enterprise. Over some 150 million years, these "products" have been ruthlessly prototyped, market-tested, upgraded, refined and otherwise made new and improved as the world around them changed. Each of these fragile specimens is a package of innovation waiting to be understood and adapted.

This is the idea behind the increasingly influential discipline of biomimicry: that we human beings, who have been trying to make things for only the blink of an evolutionary eye, have a lot to learn from the long processes of natural selection, whether it's how to make a wing more aerodynamic or a city more resilient or an electronic display more vibrant. More than a decade ago, an MIT grad named Mark Miles was dabbling in the field of micro-electromechanical and materials processing. As he paged through a science magazine, he was stopped by an article on how butterflies generate color in their wings. The brilliant iridescent blue of the various Morpho species, for example, comes not from pigment, but from "structural color." Those wings harbor a nanoscale assemblage of shingled plates, whose shape and distance from one another are arranged in a precise pattern that disrupts reflective light wavelengths to produce the brilliant blue. To create that same blue out of pigment would require much more energy-energy better used for flying, feeding and reproducing.

Miles wondered if this capability could be exploited in some way. Where else might you want incredibly vivid color in a thin package? Of course: in an electronic device display. Qualcomm, which acquired the company Miles had formed to develop the technology, used it in its Mirasol display. "We exploit the phenomena of optical interference," says Brian Gally, senior director of product management at Qualcomm. Lurking beneath the glass surface is a vast array of interferometric modulators, essentially microscopic (10 to 50 microns square) mirrors that move up and down, in microseconds, to create the proper color.

Like the butterfly's wings, "the display is taking the white ambient light around us, white light or sunlight, and through interference is going to send us back a color image," Gally says. Unlike conventional LCD screens, the Mirasol doesn't have to generate its own light. "The display brightness just automatically scales with ambient light." As a result, the Mirasol consumes a tenth of the power of an LCD reader. Qualcomm used the display in an e-reader and is offering it for license to other companies.

Though biomimicry has inspired human innovations for decades-one of the most often-cited examples is Velcro, which the Swiss engineer Georges de Mestral patented in 1955 after studying how burs stuck to his clothes-better technology and more nuanced research have enabled increasingly complex adaptions. Design software created by German researcher Claus Mattheck-and used in Opel and Mercedes cars-reflects the ways trees and bones distribute strength and loads. A fan created by Pax Scientific borrows from the patterns of swirling kelp, nautilus and whelks to move air more efficiently. A saltwater-irrigated greenhouse in the Qatari desert will use condensation and evaporation tricks gleaned from the nose of a camel. Now, thanks in part to continuing innovations in nanoscale fabrication, manufacturers are bringing an expanding array of products to market.

Biomimicry isn't itself a product but a process, drawing on natural organisms and processes in order to spark innovation. Organizations and even cities can look to ecosystems for inspiration, says Tim McGee, a biologist and member of Biomimicry 3.8, a Montana-based consultancy. In Lavasa-described as "India's first planned hill city" by its developers, who hope to eventually build homes for more than 300,000 people there-the guild consulted with landscape architects. Thus the planting strategy included deciduous trees, forming a canopy to catch, and then reflect, through evaporation, nearly a third of the monsoon rain that hits it. That effect acts "like an engine that drives the monsoon inland," says McGee, which helps prevent drought there. The hydrodynamically efficient shape of banyan tree leaves influenced the design of a better water-dispatching roof shingle, while water divertment systems were inspired by the ways harvester ants direct water away from their nests. The first Lavasa "town" has been completed, with four more projected to follow by 2020.

Everyone's talking about ways to reduce the human footprint, or to get to "net zero" impact. But nature, says McGee, usually goes one step further: "It's almost never net zero-the output from that system is usually beneficial to everything around it." What if we could build our cities the same way? "What if, in New York City, when it rained, the water that went into the East River was cleaner than when it fell?" And what if, when forests caught fire, the flames could be extinguished by means that didn't depend on toxic substances? "Nature creates flame retardants that are nontoxic," notes McGee. "Why can't we?"

For years researchers have focused on the chemistry of flame retardants, without results. But perhaps natural processes could offer some path to innovation in the laboratory, McGee says. Maybe it's the way jack-pine cones open in the face of heat (to allow reproduction even as fire destroys the forest), or the way eucalyptus trees shed scattered pieces of quick-burning bark to suck up oxygen and take fire away from the main trunk. Jaime Grunlan, a mechanical engineer at Texas A&M, has developed a fire-resistant fabric that uses chitosan, a renewable material taken from lobster and shrimp shells (and a chemical relative of the chitin in butterflies' wings), to create a nanolayer polymer coating that, when exposed to heat, produces a carbon "shell" that protects the fabric.

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How Biomimicry is Inspiring Human Innovation

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Smithsonian Magazine | The first thing you notice about the entomology collections department, Lepidoptera division, at the Smithsonian's Museum of Natural History is a faint, elusively familiar odor. Mothballs. I briefly contemplated the cosmic irony of mothballs in a room full of moths (and butterflies, a lineage of moths evolved to fly during the day) before turning to Bob Robbins, a research entomologist.

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Innovators often borrow ideas from nature, an approach called biomimicry. The cockleburr plant led to the invention of Velcro. The feet of Geckos inspired the creation of adhesives. Scientists were influenced by the eyes of lobsters and elephantnose fish to develop a night vision lens.