BioInspired! So What? Now What!

A common thread in the Turning Ideas into Reality and Making a Living with BID conference calls was the need for more opportunities to do bio-inspired design.  Janet Kübler suggested that the BID Community participate in the 2011 International Algae Competition which had the goal of developing “… an open source collaboratory that expands and shares a vision for algae in our future with design ideas for algae production landscapes, sustainable and affordable algae production systems”.   Although the competition had a flavor of bio-utilization, the Algae Landscape Design track provided an opportunity to design a system that could incorporate ecological concepts and be inspired by the Life’s Principles.

The international and interdisciplinary BID Community team collaborated on developing an entry for the 2011 International Algae Competition in the Algae Landscape Design category.  The team decided to take a problem-driven approach, developing a bio-inspired systems solution involving algae that would address important problems associated with a particular place: Haiti both before and after the devastating earthquake of 2011.