Biomimicry: Product Design Inspired by Nature

What was once seen as a fairly gimmicky and even a superficial design choice for many years has now become a leading template for innovation. For future-oriented engineers and designers, biomimicry is solving a lot of problems that once seemed unimaginable. Nature doesn’t get enough credit for how much she has managed to accomplish.

Just because we humans have managed to create amazingly tall, steel skyscrapers, plastics that can mold and bend in every way, and chemical compounds of infinite descriptions, it doesn’t mean that nature doesn’t have countless more things to teach us and use to improve our society.

Biomimicry is important for many different reasons when we’re talking about the future of industrial and product design. It is responsible for many different breakthroughs in both aesthetic and functionality of many marvelous inventions.

Biomimicry Efficiency

There is a big reason why nature has such an advantage over human engineering that makes perfect sense, but only after you get over just how smart our species is from our own biased POV: time. The Earth has had 4.5 billion years to get things right, modern humans have only really really been around for a few thousand years! And for most that time, we didn’t know anything about anything!

Another reason why nature has such an efficient and sometimes incomprehensible amount of efficiency is that life has evolved to account for all the millions of variables that put its designs to the test. Humans haven’t had enough time to run the tests needed to, for example, make an aircraft that is as efficient as a bumblebee in the air.

Float Like a Bumblebee

As a matter of fact, bumblebees shouldn’t even be able to fly, at least according to the popular saying. It just seems like those bumbling insects are too heavy to sustain flight with such small and thin wings. The secret is in how those wings beat, how they move air, and not how much air they can move on average. It turns out that, since bee flight was originally deemed “impossible” by an obviously very theoretically minded scientist, we’ve actually come to learn a lot about how bees can fly (it turns out, they flap their wings back and forth, not up and down). But it’s still not a feat we’ve been able to recreate.

The variables around them, i.e. the wind, are constantly changing, and therefore nature has found a way for the bumblebee’s wings to take advantage of how the wind moves around them. In contrast, our aircraft all have stiff wings and they do not flex or fold with the wind, so they must make up for that shortcoming by using raw power to stay afloat. Not an energy efficient process by any means, which is why our planes require such colossal amounts of fossil fuels.

Adaptive Engineering

As we move towards alternative energy standards and phase out fossil fuels, engineers will need to focus on product designs that do more with less, not because we will have less opportunities, but because we waste so much energy with what we use today. This is because a lot of our products have not changed much in the way of design since the Industrial Revolution, outside of our electronics.

Even our space programs are researching more into biomimicry engineering to see is things like adaptable wings can improve take offs and landings of future shuttles, for both commercial flights and exploration missions.

Nature has evolved based on efficiency and sustainability to the point where most of us don’t even realize how brilliant our own bodies are with how much they do with so little input. For example, our cardiovascular system spans over 60,000 miles long (no, that wasn’t a typo), pumping blood throughout our entire body, non-stop, but it is able to do so on just over a thousand calories per day, for most people. That is the definition of efficiency.

Sustainability

What type of changes would you expect to see with a world that uses biomimicry as the blueprint for all future designs? Experts have stated that anywhere from half to three-fourths of all our energy produced today could be saved by mimicking the types of efficiency that nature already accomplishes.

That’s a huge statistic, but the same type of unbelievable changes were also once said about solar and wind-powered solutions. The fossil fuel industry has been silencing and stifling this potential to protect their future, and to promote an aged energy infrastructure that has been built upon the destruction of our environment.

Wasteful design is not just due to a result of ill-funded product research, it is a matter of business. Manufactured Obsolescence is an unspoken rule among certain less scrupulous industry leaders in manufacturing. This is the concept of designing your product to fail after a certain length of time, so that there is a requirement to purchase the newer models, due to product failure.

Biomimicry does not solve everything, but it does raise the bar significantly, especially when it comes to building products that require less energy and resources to produce.

We have only been doing biomimicry, with intention to engineer based off of nature, not as a last-resort, for 15-20 years. The last few years have been exceptionally fruitful, as more engineering and research has been geared towards biomimicry. Much of the research is left on the table, as even if a great discovery is made, it probably won’t make it to the commercial application until it has been tweaked and optimized for financial gain, wide-scale product, and etc.

The Future of Biomimicry

The ultimate success of this evolution of engineering will depend on how it is made available and incorporated into society. A socialized approach of making energy and sustainability publically available to all citizens is the only way that we can realize the projected energy-saving and climate-saving impacts of more efficient and sustainable solutions created with biomimicry.

Companies must act like they are a part of the ecosystem that they benefit off of. There must be a concerted effort for manufacturers to design products that do not need fossil fuels to function. Recyclability should not be a gimmick or a convenient means of lowering overhead costs, it should be the expected practice. Biomimicry designs can eliminate waste, while improving products.

Energy Reclaimed

There are numerous examples of reducing manufacturing waste that can benefit all parties involved — after all, that’s how nature does it! Waste can be repurposed in-house or sold to another company that can use it for new products.

Scientific experts have built a biodegradable plastic derived from CO2 and limonene (a part in the oil separated from the rinds of citrus fruits) and is working with a manufacturing plant to trap their waste CO2 and utilize it as a bonding ingredient for construction supplies.

Eco-friendly modern activities are looking to discover approaches to reuse all byproducts as new materials for different procedures. For example, incorporating spent grains, a result from alcohol manufacturers, to make food and grow produce. Simple, yet effective.

As engineers keep on adopting nature’s blueprints, these biomimicry structures could work locally, with nearby recycling—like the industrial facilities that source sand to make glass.

As more researchers and architects start to grasp biomimicry, characteristic life forms will come to be viewed as guides, their procedures becoming the standard. Furthermore, our way of life everywhere will probably observe nature not as an exploitable asset, but rather as the future blueprint of our society.

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