What I Learned: Biomimicry for Innovation (Must see Video Clip)

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.