“Biomimicry” is the science and practice of looking to nature’s best biological ideas to solve human problems. It is a new term to describe an action that is not so new – humans have been emulating nature to design, create, and solve problems for millennia. After all, the basic idea makes a lot of sense. Through the process of 3.8 billion years of evolution, nature has generated adaptations that enable organisms to thrive and reproduce within the constraints of their environment. This process happens using materials that are readily available, generally non-toxic, and energy efficient. Species that haven’t sufficiently adapted, or that create conditions that destroy habitat and reduce the survival of their offspring, don’t tend to last very long. In a sense, biological evolution can be thought of a 3.8 billions years of research and development.
Today, biomimicry is being recognized not only as a way to make more nature-friendly products and business systems, but to promote conservation. It moves people from perceiving nature as a physical resource that we extract materials from, to an educational resource that we gain ideas from. In this way, intact natural systems are seen to be holding valuable information that can inspire solutions for present and future human problems – provided that these natural systems are conserved. To maximize what we can learn from nature, efforts are now underway to connect biologists to designers, architects, and engineers. These collaborations can give the people who make the products we use an understanding of how nature has solved their most difficult design problems (and in so doing, give them a new reason to protect natural systems).
Recognizing the potential for biomimicry to spur nature-friendly design, The Biomimicry Institute has launched the AskNature program. AskNature is an online database of nature’s ideas organized by design and engineering function, giving anyone the ability to look up a function (e.g. filtering salt from water) and find how evolutionary adaptations have accomplished it (e.g. how mangroves, penguins, and shorebirds desalinate without fossil fuels). The AskNature database also lists information about the people who study organisms of interest, facilitating collaboration between biologists, designers, and engineers to create nature-inspired products.
The Biomimicry Institute has also created the Innovation 4 Conservation program, to provide a more direct link between biomimicry and conservation. The program was created as a mechanism for those who create nature-inspired products to ‘give thanks’ to nature through the funding of conservation efforts. The idea is that companies that generate profits from nature-inspired products can give a portion of those profits to protect the organism or natural system that originally inspired their product (and hopefully win the loyalty of their customers by doing so).
So far, The Biomimicry Institute has helped engineers, designers, and members of the public look to nature as a potential ‘mentor’. Their success seems to be rooted, at least in part, by the solution-oriented basis of biomimicry. The Biomimicry Institute currently continues to expand their AskNature database by working with biologists to increase the list of searchable biological adaptations and by partnering with the Encyclopdia of Life. They are also looking for more companies with successful bio-inspired products to join the Innovation 4 Conservation program.
