3. Biomimetic Design
As a product design engineering student, I have been implementing the iterative design methodology in my work from the very start of my studies. It’s a cyclic process of prototyping, testing, analysis and refining a product/process. Iteration enables innovation and allows for a carefully considered final product. The issue with iteration is that time is a finite resource. More time = more prototypes = a better final product. What if we had 4500000000 years to iterate and create a product or a process?
Through the process of natural selection, living organisms have long been evolving well-adapted structures and materials over time. What if designers had to stop looking to other designers for inspiration, but change that focus to nature? Biomimetic design is precisely this; to seek solutions to human problems by emulating designs and systems found in nature. Commonly misunderstood as copying nature, it is a process of understanding intelligent behaviours in nature and animals and applying them to solve problems.
Although never completed, Leonardo da Vinci’s Flying Machine is perhaps one of the first examples of biomimetic design. He closely studied the anatomy and flight of birds to come up with what was unthinkable at the time, to enable human flight.
Biomimicry has also been used in buildings. It uses nature as a model, measure and mentor to solve problems in architecture. Using nature as a mentor means that biomimicry does not exploit nature by extracting materials from it, rather values nature as something humans can learn from. African termite mounds are a great example of this. They maintain cool and stable temperatures in their mounds throughout the year. Researches have studied this ability and created 3D images of the mound structure in order to analyse its construction. The Eastgate Centre in Zimbabwe is an example of the applications of this study. It stay cool without air conditioning and only uses 10% of the energy of a typical building of the same size.
Lotus leaves have also been studied for their self-cleaning properties. The lotus effect occurs when water rests on the surface of a leaf and beads up. The leaves have a roughened microscale surface which allow air to be trapped between water and the surface of the leaf. This super-hydrophobic surface enables the leaf to not only stay dry, but also remain clean. This surface has been recreated to coat everyday objects such as cloth or walls. It is now also being applied to metals using high-power lasers to create a rough-microtopography that mimics the lotus leaf, causing liquids to bounce off when they come into contact with the surface.
The end goal of biomimetic design is to make products, systems and cities functionally indistinguishable from the natural world. Designers typically get inspiration from other designers, creating focus/mood boards which summarise what’s already out there in the manmade world. This completely shuts out an entire world of possibilities. Why not look to nature for inspiration?
