Biomimicry

After listening to all the mid semester presentations i found that the ones that interested me the most were those that drew on examples from nature such as the Fibonacci sequence and fractal design. With this in mind i began to look into natural systems for design inspiration. This idea of taking examples from nature comes under the broad heading of Biomimicry and is about using natures billions of years of research and development to help solve our problems. I really like this idea that instead of bumbling around in the dark trying to solve things with advanced technology and brute force we can solve our design problems simply by keeping our eyes, ears and minds open to what nature is showing us every day. Some examples that are always given when talking about biomimicry are sea weed to help shape propellers, making colour display screens that rely only on sunlight to work like the butterfly's wings, bone and tree structures to influence the structure of car frames, buildings and objects. Natural systems are about efficiency, competitiveness, closed loops of materials and flexibility, if i could incorporate these ideas into my flat pack design then i believe that it would be a very effective system.