Episode 44: Biomimicry with Nicole Miller (Biomimicry 3.8)

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Episode Intro Notes

What We’ll cover

• What is biomimicry?

• Why should we care about biomimicry?

• What is the history of biomimicry?

• Examples of biomimicry in the real world

• How can organizations actually integrate biomimicry?

• About our guest, Nicole Miller

What is biomimicry?

• At its core, Biomimicry is an approach to innovation that seeks sustainable solutions to certain challenges by emulating nature’s time-tested patterns and strategies. In other words, let's apply how nature approaches problems to solve our own.
  

  • The Biomimicry Institute phrases it beautifully: The core idea of biomimicry is that nature has already solved many of the problems we are grappling with - problems like toxic waste, resource efficiency, and others. Animals, plants, and microbes are the consummate engineers. After billions of years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what surrounds us is the secret to survival.
    

  • When you put it into context and recognize that humans have been developing systems and tools for just a tiny fraction of all evolutionary time, it makes sense that we’d refer to nature for solutions to these problems that have been tested and refined over millennia.

why should we care about biomimicry?

• Short answer, for a whole number of reasons, but let’s dive into some.

  • For one, biomimicry helps foster innovation and disrupt traditional thinking. When designers are able to take a step back and consciously ask themselves how nature might solve a particular problem, they grant themselves new brainstorming opportunities to solve challenges in new and innovative ways.

  • Second, biomimicry can generate benefits for the community at large. For example, buildings, streets, and parks can be constructed to perform the same functions a natural ecosystem does. So it can help with smart cities and urban planning.

  • Third, biomimicry could be big business! Terrapin Bright Green states that “companies that leverage bioinspired innovation - a synonym for biomimicry - can increase revenues, reduce costs, and meet global needs. They can also increase their environmental, social, and corporate governance (ESG) rating, which can attract investments from the $45 trillion managed by firms supporting this trend in financial markets.”

  • Get this. By 2030, The Fermanian Business & Economic Institute estimates that bioinspired innovation could account for approximately $425 billion of U.S. GDP and $1.6 trillion of total global output. 

• Plus, bioinspired innovation could generate approximately 2 million jobs by 2030. Not too shabby.

  • However, all of this progress is not going to happen magically. The vast majority of Americans, including company leaders and government policymakers, are not yet familiar with the idea of looking to nature to solve human challenges.

    • You'll be like the top 1% of Americans in knowledge of biomimicry after this intro!

• And finally, we should care about biomimicry because it’s simply good for us on a personal level! By encouraging the study of how nature operates, biomimicry can show us how to embody resilience, how to adapt to climate and context, and how to cultivate collaborative relationships. We’d say those are all pretty positive character traits!

What’s the history of biomimicry?

• Turns out, people have been looking to nature for answers for quite a long time. The best example we could find of ancient biomimicry came in the year 3 AD, when a Chinese man named Lu Ban saw children using lotus leaves to shield themselves from the rain. He decided to mimic the flexibility and effectiveness of the leaf and create a product of his own - the very first umbrella! Fun fact - the first umbrellas were actually made of silk.

  • Fast forward about 1500 years and we arrive at Leonardo Da Vinci. Heard of him? Of his many areas of study, he was especially attuned to biomimicry in his study of birds. He was fascinated by flight and drew out schematics for many flying machines that mimicked the bone structure of birds and bats.

  • Then, in 1955, we have one of the most famous applications of biomimicry that really put the field on the map. While hunting in the Swiss Alps with his dog, George de Mestral noticed that burs - those prickly things that you find when walking through tall plants - in the woods stuck onto his clothes and his dog’s fur. After further examining the burs, he noticed that its surface was made up of many tiny hooks. They stick to things by intertwining these hooks into the loose makeup of surfaces like fabric and animal fur. He invented Velcro by mimicking this surface covered in tiny hooks and pairing it with a surface covered in tiny loops, which led to the most epic kids’ shoes of all time.

• It was also in the 1950s that the term “biomimetics” was coined by American biophysicist Otto Schmitt. After several decades of refinement, the term “biomimicry” appeared as early as 1982 and was finally popularized by the renowned scientist and writer Janine Beynus in 1997 in her book Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature.

examples of biomimicry

• Examples of biomimicry can be found almost anywhere. Let’s start with one that harkens back to our last episode on high speed trains. In the late 1990s Japan implemented biomimicry in the form of trains. The bullet trains they had been using were causing problems for all nearby inhabitants. When the trains zoomed through a tunnel, air would compress around the front of the train before releasing a tremendous booming noise once the train exited the tunnel. The chief engineer was able to solve this problem by looking to one of his hobbies: birdwatching. The kingfisher is a small bird with a long beak that dives into the water for its prey. The engineer redesigned the front of the train to be shaped like the kingfisher’s head, resulting in the train slicing the wind rather than trapping it inside the tunnels, fixing the booming sound.

• Let’s get windy. We love wind power, but one big flaw in wind turbines is that when placed too close together, turbulence disrupts and lowers the efficiency of traditional wind turbines. When studying the way schools of fish swam through water so close together, researchers noted that how the fish swam complimented each other and none of them missed a beat. This helped solve this wind turbine flaw. When they rotated the axis so it pointed vertically, the turbines could be placed much closer together without disrupting the others. This increased efficiency by up to 10x compared to the more traditional horizontal version.

• And finally, a quick callback to one of our earlier episodes on the Circular Economy. This notion of an economy with no waste also incorporates biomimicry. Waste doesn’t exist in the natural world, and we’re seeing more and more companies look to eliminate waste in their operations.
  

how can organizations incorporate biomimicry into their operations?

• It’s definitely a lofty question, but here comes the Biomimicry Institute to the rescue. Fun Fact - remember Janine Beynus who popularized the term biomimicry? She co-founded this organization!

• Biomimicry Institute developed their Biomimicry Toolbox that helps anyone integrate biomimicry into their work. They have a great graphic that summarizes their Biomimicry Design Process. The graphic is - of course! - shaped like a conch shell, starting as a wide spiral before tightening inwards towards a solution. Let’s run through the 6 steps in the process.

1) Define: Clearly articulate the impact you want your design to have in the world (i.e. the challenge you want to solve) and the criteria and constraints that will determine success.

2) Biologize: Analyze the essential functions and context that your design solution is meant to address. Then reframe them in biological terms, so that you can “ask nature” for advice.

• For example, you could move from the design question “How might we keep buildings cool in the summer?” to the biologized question “How does nature regulate temperature in hot climates?”

3) Discover: Look for natural models (organisms and ecosystems) that need to address the same functions as your design solution. Identify the strategies used that support their survival and success.

4) Abstract: Carefully study the essential features or mechanisms that make the biological strategies successful. Restate them in non-biological terms, such as “design strategies.”

• The Biomimicry Institute notes that this is the hardest step of the Design Spiral. An example would be moving from this:

• “The polar bear’s fur has an external layer of hollow, translucent (i.e., not white) guard hairs that transmit heat from sunlight to warm the bear’s skin, while a dense underfur prevents the warmth from radiating back out.”

To this:

• “A covering keeps heat inside by having many translucent tubes that transmit heat from sunlight to warm the inner surface, while next to the inner surface, a dense covering of smaller diameter fibers prevents warmth from radiating back out.”

5) Emulate: Look for patterns and relationships among the strategies you found and hone in on the key lessons that should inform your solution. Develop design concepts based on these elements.

6) Evaluate: Assess the design concept(s) for how well they meet the criteria and constraints of the design challenge and fit into Earth’s systems.

• Consider technical and business model feasibility - a recent study showed that a product can’t just rely on a link to nature - it has to be competitive in the marketplace. Accordingly, refine and revisit previous steps as needed to produce a viable solution.
  

nicole miller

• Nicole is the managing director of Biomimicry 3.8, a certified BCorp and social enterprise. Biomimicry 3.8 is a leading bio-inspired consultancy offering biological intelligence consulting, professional training, and inspiration.

• Prior to joining Biomimicry 3.8, Nicole was the Managing Director of the Montana World Trade Center, where she worked to increase global business opportunities for Montana companies. Also in the past, Nicole was Director of International Sourcing for Overstock.com, where she built the global sourcing division from scratch.