What Could be Greener: Designing with Nature
Copycatting the natural world to build better, and when possible, greener, products, materials and systems is the guiding principle behind “biomimicry,” a design methodology that’s moving into the mainstream for economic and environmental reasons.
Time is a pretty good arbiter of best practices, especially a few billion years of it. Consider the blue finned tuna, whose signature half-moon tail conserves energy via its efficient shape, or the construction of a well-ventilated mound that houses tens of thousands of termites yet stays below room temperature even under a blazing sun. Plants and animals tend to survive through good design.
Copycatting the natural world to build better, and when possible, greener, products, materials and systems is the guiding principle behind “biomimicry,” a design methodology that’s moving into the mainstream for economic and environmental reasons. For instance, that tuna tail was the engineering impetus for BioPower Systems, an Australian startup developing tidal-energy capturing machines for producing renewable electricity. And that termite colony was the inspiration for an architect who designed a naturally cooled and ventilated office/shopping mall in Zimbabwe that will reap significant energy saving costs.
Conceiving products the way Mother Nature intended may sound well and good in the abstract. But if you’re a designer, your product development cycle is invariably closer to the lifespan of a fruit fly (that’s two months, in case you’re wondering) than an elephant (69 years). Moonlighting as a evolutionary biologist isn’t exactly practical for most designers, no matter how nocturnal or green-intentioned.
Enter www.asknature.org, a database and peer-to-peer network founded by the Biomimicry Institute (www.biomimicryinstitute.org ; Missoula, MT) and sponsored by Autodesk. “It’s not easy for a designer to access biological information,” says Bryony Schwan, executive director of the Biomimicry Institute. “A designer doesn’t have the time to go through biology journals. That’s exactly what we’re trying to do with the database, is organize it by function so a designer doesn’t have to search.”
The database presents several design challenges, or “strategies” with broad names like “make,” “modify” and “maintain physical integrity,” which are then easily narrowed down by discipline. Say you were looking for ways to assemble polymers. You would select “make,” then “chemically assemble,” then “polymers” under which you’d find several case studies, including “The metabolism of Rhodobacter sphaeroides bacteria can produce biopolymers such as PHB using carbon in a fermentation process.” That’s pretty thick stuff, but boiled down it’s all about how to make biodegradable polymers for anything from bottles to diapers. Next to the abstract are some bio-inspired product ideas and applications, companies actually putting it into the market place and contact information for a researchers or experts the particular field of study.
Launched in November, Asknature was formed as a living database that’s continually updated by and for users to share ideas, both new and old. There are entries as exotic as duplicating the bright-colored scales in Morpho butterfly wings for chemical-free pigments in clothing and textiles to examining the lightweight, yet structurally impervious Toucan beak to devise better car body panels. One of the early biomimicry adopters was Sto Corp. (www.stocorp.com, Germany) which in the late 1990s partnered with a botanist to model its self-cleaning exterior paint, Lotusan, after the lotus plant. The lotus has a knack for repelling dirt. Its leaves aren’t slick, but bumpy, leaving little surface area for dirt to collect, and any that does is easily washed away with the rain. While Sto doesn’t reveal exactly what makes its paint bumpier – microscopic images show a surface that closely resembles the plant itself – it does note that ultraviolet rays play a role, as it take 30 days of sunshine for the “lotus effect” to emerge. Launched in 1999 and brought to the U.S. six years later, the coating itself “probably isn’t more or less environmentally friendly” than traditional Sto products in its creation, Silke Anthony, associate product manager for the company’s Coatings and Repair Products, said.
Schwan is quick to point out that biomimicry is more “journey” or mindset than Garden of Eden destination with instant results. Still, she remembers an especially skeptical ceramics engineer who attended one of institute’s workshops. She observed that it’s difficult to impossible unhinge ceramics from heat and chemical processes. But when author Janine Benyus, who founded the Biomimicry Institute, picked up an abalone shell – a self-assembled structure that is stronger than any man-made made ceramic fired in a kiln, the engineer’s face “completely lit up,” Schwan recalls. “This designer’s framework was always in the context of how humans make ceramics and nature makes ceramics in a completely different way. It really has to do with the way the material is layered on itself,” Schwan said.
The trend toward biomimicry in design could be more than a flash of green, as AutoDesk and the Biomimicry Institute are now collaborating on ways to integrate some techniques into future CAD products.
