BioInspired! So What? Now What!

At this Hot Topics event, our specialist panel - Rob Kesseler, Central Saint Martins College of Art & Design, Alex Parfitt, BAE Systems, Denise DeLuca, Swedish Biomimetics 3000 and panel chair Will Pearson, Director of Technology, Ravensbourne - debated how ideas flow from biology to product design, what tools and institutions enable this process, and how specialists in art, design, architecture, engineering and biology are bought together to solve tomorrow’s problems.

The book opens with a quote from Buckminster Fuller. "You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete." From there on in Pawlyn sets out to demonstrate how biomimicry offers architects a whole new system to design by. A system that will produce not only radically more efficient and effective structures, with great savings on material and energy costs, but also stunningly beautiful buildings that will have the 'bilbao effect' wherever they are located.

Technology Review describes the work of Neri Oxman, an architect and professor at MIT's Media Lab, to 'print' complex structures using concrete, polymers and other materials.  Her work goes beyond initiatives such as "Robo-Brickie Builds a House in a Day" by varying the properties of the material, such as elasticity of a polymer or the porosity and strength of concrete.  Columns can be structured with dense concrete on the outside where stress is the greatest and lighter-weight concrete on the inside Porous or composite materials could be used in low-stress areas to allow additional light into buildings. 

"Changing the way we teach engineering students to think about developing products and devices."

"Upon journeying to Jackson Hole, WY, and back from a recent Education Summit hosted by the Biomimicry Institute, a university professor and student united to create an open-source blog full of biomimicry/biomimetic ideas for art, design, science and engineering. The focus is form, function, style, subtlety, flow, intelligence and systems. The objective of this project is to inspire and inform others about things that have been done with, and can be done with, biomimicry.

"IDSA's Catalyst Case Study Program continues to initiate and accelerate a broader understanding of design’s impact on business, the environment and society. Participate in the next round of submissions and explain why your design is worthy of Catalyst case publication in 2011.

Edited by Robert Allen (2010), The Ivy Press Limited, Lewes, UK.

Also available on Amazon.ca

This recently published book includes a wealth of natural strategies and shows how they are related to existing as well as future technologies.