Biomimicry is an interdisciplinary field at the intersection of the life sciences, physical sciences, and engineering, and it is leading to an ever deeper understanding of how biological system work. It is the process of studying nature to solve human problems. The focus is not on what we can extract from the natural world, but what can we learn from nature. This learning leads to the discovery of unconventional solutions to problems that are often more efficient, economic and elegant. Or what I call bio-inspired design.
Bio-inspired design is a disruptive and creative approach to problem solving and innovation.
Innovation happens when we challenge convention and what is known. Bio-inspired design does just that! Learning from nature challenges us to think about the problem differently and apply our problem-solving mindset differently. What makes this approach disruptive or creative? From my perspective, as someone working in this field it is these three things:
- Often the opposite of traditional approaches
- Promotes use of available resources in new ways
- Requires broad knowledge of many fields rather than expert-level knowledge in one field
After years of researching in this field, I have come to define the process of bio-inspired design to be the following:
To support your BID endeavors, please use the drop down menu above to find the pages on the BID Canvas and collected BID resources.