Biomimicry Explained
I reviewed a talk by Michael Pawlyn about biomimicry in architecture in my previous post. Now I would like to cover the implementation of biomimicry in the larger area by reviewing a talk delivered by the founder of Biomimicry Institute and a pioneer of the concept herself: Janine Benyus. The video can be watched on TED website or below.
This inspiring talk is showing us how life can teach us something in technology and design. Coming from biology background, Janine stresses that since biomimicry becomes more popular, more and more architects, designers and engineers start to ask a biologist advice them in their works. Janine shares her own personal story about the conversation she had with a team of wastewater treatment engineers when they had a trip to the Galapagos Island. Taking the example of seashell, Janine showed the engineers how to solve a problem they proposed: scaling (build up of minerals inside the pipes). The engineers didn't know that the same process is happening in a seashell. The seashell is made of calcium carbonate, the same mineral that cause scaling. The seashell stops growing because the let go of a protein that can stop its crystallization. The lesson from this story is that people have been in silos and there have been lack of integration between these silos. Biomimicry points out that biology should be integrated with design and technology.
Biomimicry is not about learning the natural world, it is learning from the natural world. Natural world is the filed-testing of a 3.8 billion years of research and development. Biomimicry is not about superficial mimicry. As Janine mentioned in her talk, it's about "taking the design principles, the genius of the natural world and learning something from it".
Application of biomimicry is broad covering all aspects of the human world. The conventional we use to make things is through "heat, beat and treat". We heat the materials, we beat them in high pressure and we treat them with chemicals. Through this top-down conventional production process, Janine says, only 4% of the resource turns into product with 96% becomes waste. How life makes things is absolutely the opposite, life naturally produce things with 100% efficiency. Nothing goes to waste because everything is linked within a closed loop system.
Janine then introduces 12 principles of what life can teach human to shape their world:
1. Self-assembly: through this we can create ceramics in room temperature (as what the seashells do), and have bio-silicons allowing the computers without carcinogens.
2. CO2 as feedstock: Plants sees CO2 as food, they find a way to transform CO2 into glucose. Imagine if we can do the same.
3. Solar transformation.
4. The power of shape. Shape of a whale inspire the edge of a jet plane wing and increase its fuel efficiency. A peacock shows us that it can change color without any pigments. It change color with its shape.
5. Quenching thirst. A certain animal can pull water out of fog (out of air), imagine if we can do that.
6. Metals without mining. We can separate metals from waste stream.
7. Green chemistry. Transform the industrial chemistry into sustainable chemistry shown by nature.
8. Timed degradation.
9. Resilience and Healing.
10. Sensing and Responding.
11. Growing Fertility.
12. Life creates conditions for conductive life.
Biomimicry Life's Principles (biomimicry.net)
Biomimicry reminds us how nature have shown remarkable examples of design and technologies. We need to embrace these principles that life has used for billion of years if we want to ensure the sustainability of the world.
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