I came into this biomimicry course with a surface level understanding of the subject that didn’t go far beyond the classic Velcro example. It’s always been clear to me that learning from nature can be helpful to humans, but I had never really gone so far as to consider nature’s functions and its strategies and how we may apply those to human life.

At times I found this class challenging because of the steps it takes to conceptualize a biomimetic design. Each step in the Challenge to Biology design spiral requires a deeper level of thinking and to push beyond what might seem logical. The spiral is set up for that to happen. It expects the designer to challenge themselves and how far they may be willing to push their boundaries. The Evaluate phase exists to control for those radical thoughts and uses them to further the design iterations rather than immediately discard them for being illogical.

Designing in this way is a luxury that many of us aren’t able to realize in our work lives, but the thoughtfulness and boundary-pushing inspired by the design spiral can inform any number of design processes. In many environments, thinking outside of the box is discouraged, thought of as little more than warm-up or considered a waste of time, but it can really cause interesting breakthroughs in a design.

I enjoyed exploring Life’s Principles and how succinctly they explain the strategies of survival. They add a needed perspective to the design spiral that evaluates the effectiveness and the rationality of a design. By including this balancing step, the ones that come before it have more freedom to explore beyond the intuitive explanations and inspirations.

Living things need to meet the conditions put forth by Life’s Principles, but I’d argue that “living” needn’t be confined to flesh and blood. A neighborhood is a living system. An office. A garden. Sure, each of these systems requires human inputs and components, but the systems themselves are stronger and function for longer when they adhere to those principles that are applicable to the situation. Realizing this view caused me to get a little ahead of myself with a concept I barely knew anything about, but I found myself excited at the prospect of applying biomimicry to processes and systems.

I initially explored a path to more or less reinvent Facebook using biomimetic design. While I don’t think the biomimetic process is necessarily appropriate for that application, the thought exercise and the spiral itself could introduce some different perspectives to problems and their solves or inspire entirely different designs in areas one may not initially expect. There is a lot we have to learn from nature and our survival as a species depends on it. Humans have created incredible designs and many of them are destroying the planet. Perhaps nature’s strategies could lead us to the designs that will save it.