Biomimicry, the Future of Business and Industry

How did a carpet manufacturer use nature to design a better carpet? How does nature capture and convert sunlight in the shade? How can decentralization make business more responsive to changing markets?

The answers to these and other questions associated with biomimicry hold great potential for everything from designing a better solar panel to creating whole life systems.

Janine Benyus, a Heinz Award winner, author of Biomimicry, and founder of the Biomimicry Institute, studies how nature functions and adapts and uses that information to find natural solutions to problems in everyday life. 

In an interview with Smart Planet, Janine explains: "One thing we do — and we don't get to talk about it much — is a list called Life's Principles. This is a list of best practices that are ubiquitous in the natural world. We said to ourselves as scientists, 'What do all organisms have in common?' To us, that's an operating manual for how to be a good Earthling. For example, life runs on current sunlight. It doesn't run on ancient sunlight or fossil fuels. Life is locally attuned and adapted. It gets its needs met locally. Life is resilient because it is diverse. It embraces diversity and doesn't put all its eggs in one basket. It is decentralized. It is self-healing. It uses information and feedback to constantly learn and adapt and evolve. It emphasizes cooperation more than competition."

Interface, a carpet manufacturer, used biomimicry to make a better product. They started out with the desire to reduce the amount of carpet that is discarded into landfills. They initially developed carpet squares that can be pulled up and replaced as they wear out.

When they install the carpet, they have to match the pattern. When one of the squares gets soiled, they put down a new one. Interface will take back your bad squares and send you new ones. "But there was a 'sore thumb' effect. You'd put down a new carpet tile and see the difference. Therefore, you pick up the whole carpet and throw it in a landfill."

To solve this dilemma a forest floor was studied. If you see a leaf on a forest floor and pick it up and remove it, the eye does not notice anything missing. This is because the pattern of a forest floor is so varied. The innovation was to make every carpet tile different. You can lay it down anyway you want and there's no sore thumb effect. Varied tiles make up 40 percent of Interface carpet tile sales.

On a larger scale, Biomimicry 3.8 is applying "Ecological Performance Standards" to the architectural designs of cities in India and China in partnership with a company called HOK, a large architectural firm that operates on three continents. Ecological Performance Standards asks the question "What native ecosystem would be here if we were not?' We look at what the services of that ecosystem would be. An ecosystem service is something like how many tons of carbon are stored by that ecosystem in a year. We say a city should challenge itself to meet or exceed that level of ecosystem service."

Biomimicry Institute's current project called "Ask Nature" is designed to educate the next generation "of biomimics and do things in the public domain. We realized there were untold numbers of inventors who we would like to have the same access to this biological inspiration. Our goal with Ask Nature was to organize the world's biological information by function and to be an online library of nature solutions, so any inventor in the world at the moment of creation can type in the function and [read about a nature solution]. I'm trying to reduce impact using a helmet and up will come woodpecker skulls. We've got just north of 1,300 strategies now on the site. We have an active group of students in design programs right now, which is exactly what we want. They're doing biomimicry projects everywhere we look and they're using Ask Nature as their source of information."

On the Ask Nature website, you can learn about biomimicry, view slide shows or all 1,400 strategies using the biomimicry taxonomy. From the Ask Nature website: "Ask Nature is a free, open source project, built by the community and for the community. Our goal is to connect innovative minds with life's best ideas, and in the process, inspire technologies that create conditions conducive to life. To accomplish this, we're doing something that has never been done—organizing the world's biological literature by function." By listing biological literature by function it means it will be possible to apply natures engineering solutions to modern problems.

There are already buildings with self cleaning exteriors thanks to biomimicry. Perhaps someday we will have solar panels that generate power in the shade.