Abstract

The word itself was coined by Janine Benyus (author of the 1997 book Biomimicry) and originates from the Greek bios (life) and mimesis (imitation). For her, biomimicry is the conscious emulation of life's genius.[1] Mother nature has had 3.8 billion years of iterations in perfecting the design of life, and in this has solved a multitude of problems. The natural world is totally capable of sustaining itself in a totally cyclic way. By changing the engineering process to include taking inspiration from the natural world, we can solve not only the problems at hand but larger problems as well. Mother nature has the answer to engineering a more sustainable world, and there are countless examples that support this theory. This particular multi-case study suggests that biomimicry is a promising approach for not only accelerating innovation but also creating a framework for how engineers can design an environmentally sustainable world.

Introduction

Mother nature holds the key to how engineers will reshape a more sustainable future. Using bio-inspired designs, engineers can create new tech that is not only better for consumers, but equally as beneficial to the planet. Over the course of 3.8 billion years, nature has worked on perfecting every species through the process of redesign and reiteration, this is what makes mother nature the greatest engineer of all time. By modeling innovation after the natural world, we stand to create a more sustainable, verdant world.

There are three things we can replicate from the natural world: physical form, natural processes, and entire ecosystems. The term used to describe modeling design after entire ecosystems is ‘The Circular Economy’. Life follows a cycle, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Following that end, the life which once gained benefit from an ecosystem then returns to benefit other aspects of that ecosystem. The natural world takes care of itself, the idea of modeling the design process after the natural world is what will lead to a more sustainable future.

Mother Nature as An Engineer

There is a realization that everyone has at one point or another, that when you look around you, everything you see has come from the earth in one way or another. The screen, or paper, that you are reading from, the chair that you are sitting in, the vehicle that drove you there, and the road that it was driving on. Everything and anything that is, or ever has been designed, has come from this amazing planet that we live upon. If you look back to the very beginnings of humans using tools, you would see that somewhere along the line, we were presented with a problem. We then looked around at the materials that were available to see if we could come up with a solution to that problem. It was from this concept that engineering was born.

The problems that we are facing in the present, are that carbon emissions are rising in the atmosphere, trash is overfilling our landfills, the population is skyrocketing, oceans are becoming more acidic, and diseases are mutating faster than we can keep up with.[2] Many of these problems have arisen from things that we as humans have influenced, often from trying to make our lives easier. We looked out at the environment around us and created cars that run on fossil fuels, raised cattle that emit methane, and powered our lives with electricity. We did this all while reducing the number of plants that neutralize the excess carbon we are emitting, and while packaging our products inside environmentally harmful plastics. In trying to solve our problems, we have created newer ones. The question then becomes, what can we learn from nature to mitigate the damage we have done?

               Natural Selection

Mother Nature uses natural selection to create improvements in environments. Natural selection works by creating slight changes through many iterations, successful changes move on to the next phase, and non-successful changes die out.[3] How can we equate this to the design process?

Let’s look more specifically at how natural selection works. In species, there is a natural variation of traits. For example, look at the people you know, nearly everyone looks entirely different from one other. We have different colored eyes, or skin, or hair. Those features are all traits of our genetic make-up. Traits are also things such as how well food gets metabolized, or how good our bodies are at fighting diseases. Bodies with the most favorable traits are most likely to survive long enough to pass on these traits to future generations. Along the way, random mutations in DNA are also a factor. Mutations that are beneficial to survivability then get passed on, and unfavorable traits die out.  If you think of each generation as another iteration in the design process, it is easy to see why mother nature is such a fantastic engineer, she has had billions of years of experience.

Consider this, every year a new version of the iPhone hits stores. The design is improved based on what features of the phone were used the most. What consumers found most helpful stayed, and what they didn’t use got scrapped. Then new ideas were presented, and those which worked stayed, and those which didn’t, went. This is how natural selection and the engineering process are the same. After billions of generations, no matter the species, or whether it is a plant or animal, mother nature has presented engineers with the most innovative traits from which to gather inspiration. As Kevin Beck from Lenovo said: “Engineering is ultimately all about iteration. You rarely get anything right the first time. You build it and you test it and you figure out what's wrong with it and then you improve it and you do that again, and again, and again, and again, but nature's been doing that for billions of years.”[4]

               Biomimetic Design

Engineers have gathered inspiration from a great number of things, there really is no limit to the imagination. It may come as a surprise that biology is not even a required course, at a majority of institutions, for most engineering disciplines. Engineers are given the tools that they need to solve problems, they are taught how systems work, and what has been engineered in the past, but once they are given those tools, the inspiration is up to the engineer. There are vast numbers of examples of times when engineers were inspired by nature which lead to favorable outcomes. There are a few biomimetically designed products that are most often referenced when speaking on the subject. The Shinkansen Bullet Train in Japan is a very well-known example of taking inspiration from the natural world and using it in the design process.

The Tōkaidō Shinkansen began rolling down the tracks in October 1964 and was unrivaled in speed and efficiency for twenty-five years.[5]  In the late eighties, early nineties, Japan wanted to expand the service of the rails to residential areas, but there was one huge problem: when the Shinkansen left a tunnel, it was extremely loud. As luck would have it, the lead engineer on the team to redesign the Shinkansen was a bird watcher.[6]  Eiji Nakatsu led the redesign, replacing three key components of the train with parts modeled after three different birds, an owl, an Adélie penguin, and a kingfisher.  A part called the pantograph, which connects the train to the wires that power it, was designed to resemble the shape of an owl’s feathers. The shape of the pantograph used the same type of serration and curvature. This structure of the owl’s feathers helps to cut down on noise when the owl is hunting its prey. Since the engineers were trying to cut down the noise of the Shinkansen train, this design made perfect sense. Another part of the pantograph, the shaft, was modeled after an Adélie penguin. The penguin’s body shape is designed for low resistance in water, and the ability to slide around on its belly when it’s not in the water. Lower wind resistance means lower noise and lower fuel consumption. Lastly, the shape of the nose of the train came from the kingfisher. This is the most noticeable of the design changes. The kingfisher’s beak is shaped to dive from the air to the water while making a minimal splash. Nakatsu’s team took the shape of the kingfisher’s beak, along with different variations of it, and studied it using aerodynamic testing in the laboratory. The team took the design that was most aerodynamically sound and formed the front of the train after it. As it turned out, the quietest train nose design was the one modeled most closely to the beak of the kingfisher.

In 1997 the redesign of the Shinkansen Bullet Train debuted. The new design turned out to be ten percent faster, use fifteen percent less energy, and it met the goal of reducing the sound to below seventy decibels, the residential noise limit.[7]  By modeling the design of the train after the design that mother nature had already completed, engineers not only solved the problem they were trying to fix, they improved the overall performance of the train. It was so simply put by Christophe Haubursin: “Nakatsu’s case is a fascinating example of biomimicry, the design movement pioneered by biologist and writer Janine Benyus. It’s the idea that big challenges in design, engineering, and sustainability have often been solved before through 3.8 billion years of evolution on earth. We just have to go out and find them.”

What Can We Take from Nature?

Eiji Nakatsu modeled the Shinkansen after the shape of the kingfisher’s beak. Shape is one of the many things that we can learn from mother nature. Another design that was modeled after the form of a natural object is Velcro. Velcro was made after its creator went for a walk with their dog and noticed that burrs stuck to the dog’s fur and to shoelaces. By noticing that a device that could be stuck and unstuck repeatedly may be useful, the creator came up with Velcro. Shape or form are not the only things that can be copied from nature, we can also copy process.

Mimicking Processes

Each of the things that we model after nature brings us one step closer to a sustainable future. If we focus on the largest causes of problems in our world then we can start taking great strides towards a more sustainable world. One way that engineers are mimicking processes are by studying how bees communicate. As Amelia Hennighausen and Eric Roston from Bloomberg have stated “Bees are more than busy; they’re nimble, too. Despite their limited brainpower, individuals can sense what job the colony needs done and set at it instinctively. A problem with complex human infrastructure, such as the electrical grid, is that its various parts don’t talk to each other. Grid components don’t monitor the whole grid. Regen Energy turns a company’s uncommunicative power-sucking appliances and machines into a network, able to balance loads during pricey peak-power periods when electricity is expensive, or worse, unreliable. The company provides controllers that communicate wirelessly with each other to maximize efficiency, keeping every bee in the hive in sync.”[8] Until engineers devise a way to move completely away from fossil fuels, it is important that we make the fossil fuel powered energy grids as efficient as possible.

In nature, it is in the best interest of all species to be as energy efficient as possible. “Natural selection” is essentially a fancy term for the ability to survive. The more likely that a species is to survive, the more likely they are to pass on their traits to the next generation. So, a species where one generation has acquired a mutated gene, which has given the species the ability to metabolize their food more efficiently, has increased the likelihood that the species will survive when food is scarce. This gives the species a better opportunity to pass on its traits. Therefore, to reiterate, it is in the best interest of all species in the natural world to be as energy efficient as possible.

Energy efficiency in the design world translates to two different things, that a product is more affordable to both manufacturers and consumers, and that a product has less of an impact on the environment. One more piece of the sustainability puzzle is solved. Another process that engineers have taken from nature are more environmentally friendly windmills. Windmills are like a fantastic soup filled entirely with ingredients from the natural world.

Wind farms are criticized for a number of reasons, that they are an eyesore, take up a lot of space, or that they could be potentially harmful to unsuspecting birds, which could be hit while flying. The mainstream culture is coming around wind farms, but in the meantime, engineers are designing ways to make them as efficient as possible. According to the company “Whalepower Corporation”, there are three main obstacles that wind turbine designers must overcome: “poor reliability when winds fall or fail, noise – especially tip chatter caused by tip stalling, poor performance in unsteady or turbulent air”[9] and the Whalepower Corporation has found a solution to these problems: they have modeled the blades of their wind turbines after the fins of a whale. “Humpback whales are surprisingly agile swimmers considering each beast weighs in at about 80,000 pounds. Part of their swimming prowess may come from a row of warty ridges, called tubercles, on the front edge of their fins. Frank Fish, biology professor at West Chester University in Pennsylvania, discovered that by adding rows of similar bumps to turbine blades he could reduce drag and noise, increase speed to changing wind direction, and boost the power harnessed by 20 percent.”[10]  As with many design problems, even those in nature, designers often solve one problem to create or find another.

Wind power is a great achievement, but it has limitations. The greater the size of a windmill, the further is required to place them apart from one another, otherwise, their efficiency goes down. Hennighausen and Roston from Bloomberg put it this way: “Turbines have become more powerful, but their size requires that they be spaced far apart. That means a wind farm takes up a lot of land. John Dabiri of Caltech found a solution underwater. He built an experimental wind farm…in which the location of turbines relative to each other takes advantage of the air flow among them. The turbine placement was determined by studying the wake vortices produced by schools of swimming fish…In essence, the blades take advantage of the wind's behavior, for energy production, the way that fish take advantage of the water's behavior for forward movement.”[11]   If engineers and product designers are able to mimic that form and processes then what is stopping them from modeling their designs after entire ecosystems?

The Circular Economy

The term used to describe modeling after an entire ecosystem is the circular economy. A circular economy is a restorative structure in which the resources you put in, waste, emissions, and energy deficiencies, are minimized by closing the cycle. Everything that goes in has a purpose, and is either reused, or it is environmentally neutral. Children are taught to reduce, reuse, recycle, these are the same things that a circular economy is trying to provide. We can create a circular economy by creating longer lasting designs that require less maintenance, that can be repaired instead of disposed, or that can be reused for another purpose, or for the same purpose. When the products are finally unusable, they can either be entirely recycled, or they are entirely biodegradable.

In the natural world, things begin with life. They consume energy efficiently. After they die, they decompose. Decomposition is not the end, as a species decomposes, it nurtures something living. That living thing goes on to complete and begin the cycle anew. It is a zero sum. What makes something “sustainable”? According to myclimate.org: “The ecological definition of sustainability originated with the Brundtland Report in 1987, which describes sustainable development as a kind of development that satisfies the needs of the present without adversely affecting the ability of future generations to satisfy their needs.”[12]  If we rethink the design process to include asking ourselves, not only “what is the problem?”, and “how would we solve the problem?”, but also “how would nature solve the problem?” and “how can we make sure that the solution to the problem is environmentally neutral?” then we will find ourselves in a sustainable world in no time.

The way that the environment works is that it maintains a constant homeostasis. Say for instance you have an ecosystem of rats and rice. One year the rat population is particularly high and so there is not enough rice to feed them, and so, a certain percentage of the population dies. The next year there will be fewer rats because not enough of them survived long enough to reproduce. That means that the rice crops will in turn thrive, because there aren’t as many rats to eat the rice. When the rice booms all the rats will be nourished and the rat population will again grow, and the endless cycle will continue. Now imagine this type of closed system with every species of plant and animal. This is what we refer to as homeostasis. Study.com explains ecosystem homeostasis like this: “Everything in nature works in a delicate balance... Ecosystem homeostasis is all about equilibrium. When something is in equilibrium, it's in balance. In the real world of ecosystems, nothing is ever perfectly balanced. So, an ecosystem in equilibrium is said to be in a relatively stable state. This means that the populations of various animals in the ecosystem are generally staying within a similar range. Populations can go up and down in cycles, as long as there isn't a general upwards or downwards trend.[13]  So if maintaining homeostasis is what it takes to be sustainable, and engineers can find a way to design our needs to function in a way that maintains that homeostasis, we will then have solved the problem of sustainability.

Conclusion

It is important that the innovators of the present and the future recognize their responsibility to design a world suited not only for our needs of the present, but also for the needs of those in the future. Mother nature has given us the blueprints for how to create a cyclical, sustainable world, and if we take the lessons that she has laid out, then we have all the tools to build a brighter tomorrow. If future biologically inspired systems are more sustainable than current ones, biologically inspired design would become the new exemplary standard of engineering.