Biomimetics - The influence of nature on design Charlie Morris Lower Sixth
In winter every day the northern hemisphere is pumping out carbon dioxide at an alarming rate. This creates the induced greenhouse affect where too much of the sun’s light rays are getting trapped in the atmosphere causing global warming. Day by day this carbon dioxide along with other harmful gasses such as methane increases, blanketing our atmosphere. If this continued throughout the year the earth’s temperatures would sky rocket. However, the natural world has a way of cleaning up our mess. Something that we have no control over happens, as the snow begins to melt, trees spring to life and the deciduous forests of the north begin to breathe in the carbon dioxide in the air that we so unthoughtfully put there. This continues all the way until the leaves start to fall off the trees when autumn arrives and the trees lie dormant for another year. Regulating and absorbing carbon dioxide on a mass scale to prevent a changing climate is something we can only grasp at achieving. So when we look for solutions to human caused issues shouldn’t it be nature that we look to? That is exactly what biomimicry is, looking to nature to learn from and mimic the strategies to solve human design. Janine Benyus, a natural sciences writer, wrote that ‘we should be looking at the biological elders’ and be ‘apprentices to these masters’. We are a very young species only about 200,000 years old. So with new design
problems we face every day shouldn’t we be turning towards life that has perfected its own functions for up to billions of years to be as efficient and as effective as possible for each circumstance and environment? One place humans have tried to mimic other organisms is in the production of materials. All other species can only make new materials in or near their own bodies. This means that they have found a way to form the materials they need without the immense pressures and temperatures that we use in the lab. A good example of this is silk, which can be produced by beetles, spiders, silkworms and bees, just to name a few. So for instance a spider inside its abdomen has watery proteins as well as special nozzle like organs called spinnerets. The watery proteins with a simple reaction can form the silk which hardens when in contact with the air. Although this process only requires water and can be done at room temperature the fibre that the spider produces is 5 times stronger than steel and can be up to 50 times lighter! This is being looked at by fibre manufactures along with scientists to make materials with these properties with this ease. For example, Dr. Tara Sutherland at CSIRO Ecosystem
Sciences can use bacteria to make bee silk proteins and spin them into solid strings just as bees do. However, no scientist has yet been able to produce a fiber as strong as that of a spider with the normal pressure and temperature it is able achieve it in. Another place nature has been looked at for inspiration for our own design is in architecture. A slightly different approach is adopted whereby the sustainable design can be achieved by following a ‘set of principles’ rather than ‘stylistic codes’. This means we don’t so much replicate nature’s form or function but design by recognizing the rules that conduct these. The idea can be traced back as early as the ancient Greeks and Romans who made things such as treeinspired columns. However, the term only seems to have come into imagery in the 1930s. Looking at the aesthetic side generally a designer looks to flowers for their inspiration. The lotus temple in New Delhi, for instance, takes the shape of the lotus, a sacred flower among almost all Indians as it symbolizes purity of the heart and mind. To capture the beauty of the flower it ended up being
The lotus temple in New Delhi, for instance, takes the shape of the lotus, a sacred flower among almost all Indians.
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