Biomimicry 3.8–Something BIG is coming…

A new leap forward from the makers of the #Biomimicry Revolution

The cool guys over at the “Biomimicry Guild” + “Biomimicry Institute” + “AskNature” + “Biomimicry Professional Pathways” have united forces to create Biomimicry 3.8 a new revolution that will integrate and spread Biomimicry through an interconnected network like nature would do. First step is www.biomimicry.net where you can get a glimpse of what is about to come in the following months. So stay tuned for more upcoming news.

And also, for the ones in design disciplines demanding a deep introduction in the matter, look over at the pages in www.fastcompany.com/biomimicry for specific articles created as part of a partnership by FastCompany and Earthsky.org

Bionic Innovation

An air-jelly-fish or a mechanic bird. The future is here, just watch it unfold #biomimicry

On the recent TED Global 2011 – The Stuff of Life (Edinburgh, Scotland. July 11-15, 2011), it was presented the artificial bird by Markus Fisher, and digging a bit more into it, there is an enormous quantity of projects carried out by ‘Festo’ that mimick life and develop technology with inspiration from nature.

Festo is a leading world-wide supplier of automation technology and the performance leader in industrial training and education programs. Through the Bionic Learning Network, they have been researching and developing projects with biomimicry principles since 2006, and you can see them all on their website.

Biomimicry: Nature as a source for Innovation

 

Biomimetics, Bionics,… to define life-like creativity engineering or nature inspired human inventions.

Those words are relatively new, as they appeared in the last 50 years and since then, they are having an increasing interest and development in those fields. The term ‘bionic’ was coined by Jack E. Steele in 1958 and ‘biomimicry’ in 1982, and was popularized by scientist and author Janine Benyus in her 1997 book Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature (strongly recommended). Biomimicry is defined in her book as a "new science that studies nature's models and then imitates or takes inspiration from these designs and processes to solve human problems". Well, very clear but no so easy. Nature is hiding big secrets and humans take thousands of years to investigate and apply those special tweaks to human inventions. For example, Leonardo da Vinci created the concept for flying machines about 500 years ago but it wasn’t until 1903 when the Wright Brothers, succeed in creating and flying the first airplane, developed by observations of pigeons in flight.

For me, this is one of the most interesting parts of science, as it leads us to a more sustainable future. In addition we support our basis on ‘products’ that have thousands of years of evolution, and give us proof they are working quite nicely. And also we contribute to a better living consuming less resources and generating less waste.

Here you can find some very interesting talks from TED & the Atmoshphere event by Janine Benyus and also Michael Pawlyn designer of The Eden Project talking about Biomimicry in Architecture. And also, Asknature.org is an essential live source created by The Biomimicry Institute in collaboration with the giant Autodesk for collaboration and documentation of how Nature Intelligence solves some of the problems we are facing today. Enjoy!

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