The first time that i heard this word was in a Robert Full talk in TED, where he shows his investigations on Geckos feet, and how he and his team manages to achieve a deep understanding of the mechanic that allow this little lizard to climb glass walls with almost no effort, and - here's the exiting part- develop a sinthetic simulation of this feet that recreate the special habilities of this animal. The incredible amount of work made by Full and his team had big rewards in patents of new materials, applications and designs.
Two of most intereting things -at least for me- were, first the multidisciplinary aproach, mostly in the part of developing the new feet and the bottomline of the talk. In the first one because the complexity of nature demand the integration of the differents sides of sciences and technology to produce holistic understanding and feasable designs. The second, the bottomline ''we most preserve the nature design before they are lost'' this words point to
a new issue in the enviromental crisis that we are living. Nature produce extremly eficient and creative solutions through thousands - if not millions- of years of iterations, solutions that can be lost in a couple of years because the habitats destruction and animal extintion.
Other thing that caught my attention was the Biomimicry as a methodology. As a designer most of the process involve on creation have to do with the interaction between the forms and the enviroments; so, as Christofer Alexander says long ago, we analize the ''surroundings'' of an object (fisical, semantic, perceptive, mechanic, etc) and we propose forms that ''fits'' properly with these surroundings...but what Nature do if it is not that!? I'm not saying that designers are a force of Nature, but the process of design -and with this i mean every process call design- has to do a lot with what Nature do. Multiple and consecutive iterations to
develop a specific form, function or behavior. In this way it is very interesting the example of FESTO, German company who take the concept of Biomimicry to develop Pneumatic Robots who works, looks and behave like real animals.
This robots born from the deep understanding of the motion of these animals, and it is the transference of that understanding of mechanical principles to the design of these pneumatic creatures where lays the relevance of the biomimicry research; the groundbreaking conceptual innovation, in this case, of how mechanical devices can stop to be mechanical devices and become creatures with specific functions, in a product more close to poetry than engineering.
Biomimicry in the form of Biomechanics it isn't new, in every culture we can find examples of how the men build tools based in the observation of nature, but what it is new is put the focus on the materials and behaviors. In the last years the research on how the Nature resolve his more smallest structures combined with the Nanoengineering had resulted in the revolution of the materials industry. But maybe the most promising area of Biomimicry it's the study of the naturals behaviors that can lead to the improvement of the responsiveness of our own enviroment due to the basic principle that the behaviors are modeled by the information that the subject can perceibe. If we can improve our undertanding on how the Nature ''talk'' and interact with him self we can start to design the enviroment it self, not just the material part of it but the way that the enviroment can generate by it self the responses (forms, structures, stimulus, ...)for the immediate needs. An self evolving artificial enviroment.
For now Biomimicry it is at service of the cutting edge technology insdustry, but why not expect that in the future this path also take us to a better comprention of how we can live in Nature and not just above the Nature.
Iluminated Apparel 2010 from Lumina Motion on Vimeo.
