BIOMIMICRY: NATURE AS MODEL, MEASURE AND MENTOR
Presenter: Rose Tocke
Biologist at the Design Table with the Biomimicry Guild in Helena, Mont.

The natural world has something offer us: it can inform our technologies and designs. It has solved most, if not all, of the challenges we seek to solve in the built world: regulating temperature, humidity, light and sound; creating structural materials that withstand compression, tension and shear; filtering air and water; distributing materials, air, water and electricity; achieving adhesion; establishing foundations; and creating color. An electric eel can generate 600 watts of electricity instantaneously, without harm to itself. The butterfly does not create color with pigment; it uses layers of fat cells that reflect and refract light to create structural color, which requires less energy.

Imagine a built world that operates like the natural world: where water emerges from a mining operation cleaner than when it went in, where we harness the pulse of the city. Biomimicry is about going outside to find out who lives where you live and how they can live so elegantly. The clouded salamander changes its color to regulate its temperature and protect itself from the sun. What if our buildings did the same? This is about asking ourselves: how does the natural world do what we’re trying to do?

The Biomimicry Guild has developed a model of life’s principles, depicted as a butterfly. There are three basics, nature’s operating conditions: the earth is in a state of dynamic non-equilibrium (i.e., life has always changed); earth is water-based (i.e., we cannot survive without it); and the earth is subject to limits and boundaries (i.e., we must conform to fit in). The wings of the butterfly represent the two primary principles: life creates conditions conducive to life (e.g., it uses benign manufacturing) and life adapts and evolves (e.g., it integrates cyclic processes).

Nature as mentor is paradigm changing. Asking not what we can extract from it—but what we can learn from it—will change our relationship with the natural world.

There are three ways to emulate the natural world: form (e.g., a shark’s skin, which decreases drag); process (e.g., how abalones make a nearly indestructible ceramic); and ecosystem (e.g., why chickens and cows should live together). All of these models from nature have been applied—on ship’s hulls, in glass and on farms respectively.

The Molecular Heat Eater (MHE®) is a non-toxic, biodegradable flame retardant informed by the acid/base chemical reactions of the citric acid cycle. Based on the way sea plants sway in the ocean waves, bioWAVE™ is the only wave energy conversion system to absorb energy over the full depth and to self-orient with wave direction. There are many more examples of putting biomimicry into practice.

How will you look to nature for inspiration? Take a workshop. Take a hike. Ask yourself: how does nature...

Additional Information

The Biomimicry Guild: www.biomimicryguild.com

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