Reading Peter Wohlleben's "The Hidden Life of Trees" transformed my perception of nature. The trees, which I had so routinely passed every morning on my run through Hampstead Heath and whose presence I had only subconsciously acknowledged, became sentient, three-dimensional-beings. I was awestruck by the notion of trees "talking" to one another through mycorrhizal networks much like extended human nervous systems. This burgeoning sense of alterity pushed me to want to learn more about the hidden workings of the natural world.
Through Janine Benyus' "Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature", I began to notice the many parallels between the natural and man-made world. With 3.8 billion years of experience, wisdom and evolutionary refinement, nature truly is an R&D lab yet to be rivalled. This distinctly changed how I view biodiversity loss: the loss of a species is like the loss of an idea. The same way we preserve historical manuscripts and books for future generations, we must preserve nature's "idea libraries".
The more I learn about the natural world, the more enchanted I am with its ingenuity. Nature's blueprints have the potential to drive innovation in the modern world. However, this isn't an entirely new concept. People have always looked to nature for inspiration in art and science. By way of example, Leonardo da Vinci, one of the earliest known biomimics, designed flying contraptions inspired by his studies of bird's wings. Yet, since the industrial revolution, we have moved away from the natural world, and its wisdom has largely become foreign and invisible to us. I believe Benyus' book on biomimicry sparked a rediscovery.
But what exactly is biomimicry? Is it a scientific discipline, a problem solving and design approach or a sustainability ethos? There is no single, definite answer. Biomimicry means something different to each individual. For me, it is the sum of these interpretations and more. It is an opportunity to restore our forgotten kinship with the natural world, to shift away from being apart from nature to become a part of it once again.
Using AskNature, a computational research tool, I delved deep into learning about how engineers, scientists, and designers are leveraging nature's ideas to inject innovation and creativity into their work: from optimised, highly efficient wind farms inspired by schooling fish, and concentrated solar power plants inspired by Fibonacci spirals, to fog catching nets inspired by the Namib Desert beetle. It's no exaggeration to say that nature is our greatest ally and biggest source of inspiration in solving the increasingly complex environmental challenges that humanity faces.
Applying a bio-inspired approach in my own engineering projects, I have come to understand and appreciate its power. For example, I modelled the flat-pack form for a smart educational recycling bin I designed from my exploration of nature's geometries. Adopting the hexagonal lattice found in honeycombs as a blueprint, I employed structural topology optimisation principles to significantly economise on material and increase the body's structural rigidity and its 3D printed casing. My study of how and why bees create honeycombs made me appreciate nature's fundamental creativity and pull to efficiency. Bees aren't mathematicians, and yet they have an innate sense of geometric optimisation. In kneading and heating the initially circular cells in just the right places, the sheets reform into hexagons. There is much to learn from nature's efficient, elegant manufacturing methods.
As an aspiring engineer and inventor, I hope that looking to nature will someday become "second nature" to me. I hope to become the type of engineer who sees nature as a model, measure and mentor, and asks themselves not what they can extract from nature, but rather what they can learn from her.