Jim Brown

What I Learned: Biomimicry for Innovation (Must see Video Clip)
July 14, 2008

What I learned this week ... I pulled from the Innovating to Win blog entry titled Interesting Video On Drawing Innovation Inspiration from Nature. It has always occurred to me that a lot of design has been lovingly copied from what we are most familiar with - our bodies and the physical world we live in - by creating metaphors that do what do. We copy what we can observe, and usually make it better because it has only one purpose as opposed to our bodies which are like the famous swiss army knives that have capabilities for all occasions and needs. This video (and the clear brainpower that has been applied to the research behind it) goes many, many steps beyond my thinking and applies some real rigor to studying animal behavior to discover very useful engineering principals that we can leverage for our own purposes.

Brief Introduction
The video is a presentation by Berkley Professor Robert Full. It is a very interesting, funny, and highly educational piece. He shares some very interesting research and findings, and some advice on how not to simply copy nature, but understand underlying principals and use those to inspire new design. He starts by saying that engineering calculations show:

• Bees can't fly
• Dolphins can't swim
• Geckos can't climb

Clearly nature holds many answers to questions we are asking now, and will ask in the future. He ends saying that we need to preserve nature's designs or it's secrets will be lost forever. Very compelling.

Without Further Ado
I really can't add anything to the good professor's talk. Watch the video, it is about 21 minutes long, and it is fascinating.

So that's what I learned, I hope you found it at least half as interesting as I did. Who knew how Geckos feet work? I didn't, if you did or have any other good examples of biomimicry let us know about it. Hats off to the folks at Invention Machine for capturing this one.

Posted by Jim Brown on July 14, 2008 | Comments (2)