Biomimicry 101: What is Biomimicry?

Biomimicry is a movement, a design discipline, and a problem-solving method. In biomimicry thinking, nature is our mentor, measure, and model. It is the practice of looking to nature for inspiration to solve our human design challenges in a regenerative way. Biomimicry helps us create solutions that are more sustainable by emulating forms, processes, and ecosystems.

Nature has had 3.8 billion years of research and development, which have resulted in the ingenious designs that we see all around us today. While we might emulate a natural form (the shape of a beak) to solve a human problem (entering a medium without a splash), we might also want to study processes, functions, and even complex ecosystems to learn from the wisdom of the natural world.

What does it look like when we emulate an ecosystem? At this level, we create elements of a system that take and use the waste material from other elements, fitting all parts seamlessly into a (circular) system.

Making a product beautiful, useful, easy to use and maintain, recyclable, or even made with biodegradable materials is great, but this new product also needs to be part of a larger economy, and it needs to fit in without depleting the Earth and its people.

“If you make a bio-inspired fabric using green chemistry, but you have workers weaving it in a sweatshop, loading it onto pollution-spewing trucks, and shipping it long distances, you’ve missed the point.” (Janine Benyus)

Animals and plants make things too; they “manufacture” material on their own bodies. However, here is a big difference: in nature, there is no use of heating to very high temperatures, no beating of material under extreme pressure, and no treating with harmful chemicals.

The Biomimicry Design Process

At the very center of biomimicry thinking is the observation that life creates conditions conducive to life.

The design process involves scoping the challenge (identifying the function), discovering biology, creating designs, and evaluating the results. Biomimics use Life’s Principles, or “deep patterns,” found in nature in their work. Life’s Principles show up at the beginning as guiding principles and at the end of the design process as tools for evaluation.

For more information, please visit the Biomimicry Institute.

Biomimicry 3.8’s Design Lens