Defining Biomimicry

Art work by Dale Chihuly, photographed by Thomas Hawk

Though environmental crisis continues to impose its weight of challenges on the human race, perhaps what is more threatening is our potential to flounder in a sea of our own ingenuity. Solutions to the myriad of ecological, economic, environmental, social and medical problems associated with the rapid degeneration of natural resources remain disconnected, unrefined, unfunded or unexplored. Part of the reason for this is the fragmented means by which we approach these complex, interdisciplinary problems, producing self-contained vesicles of specialized information. Collaborations between fields often segregated by antique perspectives is required to fully realize the potential of specialized research. We must create a working web, or system of information sharing and product production. Fortunately we are equipped with powerful tools to realize these goals; social networking and the internet have expanded beyond expectations in the last decade. What remains is to overcome our own traditional definitions ofart and science as segregated disciplines with little overlap, and revise it.

One particularly promising, though somewhat marginalized field of sustainable research and development is Biomimicry. Biomimicry, or Biomimetics is a spiraling, continuous process, taking nature as inspiration to generate individual products or systems and processes for the purpose of integration into a sustainable system. The term was originally coined by Janine Benyus in the late 90s, but has evolved beyond her original concept into a much broader and unrefined term, given the advancement of sustainable technologies and biological information.

Now, I propose a new definition for Biomimicry highlighted by the Biomimicry Helix Model illustrated in Defining Biomimicry: Architectural Applications in Systems and Products a peer-reviewed paper emphasizing the practical applications of Biomimicry in sustainable architecture.Defining Biomimicry has been recently submitted to the Undergraduate Research Journal at the University of Texas at Austin, and is pending publication.

You can access this paper here