Show Notes
What is Biomimicry?
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Episode Transcript
Speaker 0 00:00:05 That's not, here's your symbiosis mountain team. You're welcome. Do you know something? There's a phrase that I've been mulling over for a week now?
Speaker 1 00:00:15 Oh yes. What is it? Would you like to share it with me over to you?
Speaker 0 00:00:18 I we'd love, uh, to share with you over T so I heard it in a Ted talk by a prestigious professor, Jen Benyus and she said, imagine designing spring.
Speaker 1 00:00:29 What's an interesting idea to design spring, even though I'm a creative person, it's really difficult to think of all the things that spring needs to take place. So imagine the precise coordination of energies that gradual increase in Blyton temperature, uh, flowering, the pollination.
Speaker 0 00:00:49 Yeah. The impressive thing is that nature recycles uses the energy. It means demands local expertise and rewards corporation. This idea of how nature solves his problems through intelligent design is called biomimicry.
Speaker 1 00:01:04 Hmm. That sounds interesting. And what is bio-mimicry like, do we imitate nature?
Speaker 0 00:01:10 Yeah, I've been reading about it by a mimicry is the human imitation of systems models and elements of nature for the purpose of solving complex human problems comes from the Greek words, bios, which means life and mimesis or limitation. So humanity has a side there that it can dominate or improve nature. So working through imitation is a radically new approach. So revolution really, and what is important is not what humanity can extract from nature, but what we can learn from nature.
Speaker 1 00:01:43 Yeah. That's really interesting. Can you give me an example?
Speaker 0 00:01:46 Uh, yeah, I seem to remember you like architecture.
Speaker 1 00:01:50 Yes. One of my favorite architects is saw the Hadeed the first woman to win the Pritzker prize. And she's my favorite precisely because she used natural shapes and materials in her constructions because she was inspired by shells or Riverstone.
Speaker 0 00:02:05 Beautiful. Well, look at this symbiosis, honey, can you guess what my favorite example of natural architecture might be?
Speaker 1 00:02:14 Let me think the honeycomb.
Speaker 0 00:02:16 Yeah, you're a genius Vesna, the honeycomb, and that uses the maximum amount of space with the least amount of material needed to create a wall. So bees create these perfect six sided compartments without any specifications for optimum strength and all of that without wasting any wax, some contemporary architects have been studying and reproducing the bees we have built.
Speaker 1 00:02:39 That's really amazing. So do these concepts get used across other fields?
Speaker 0 00:02:44 Uh, yeah, for example, when I recently traveled to Japan, the Shinkansen or the high speed train system and its 700 series design was directly inspired by the way, the King Fisher cuts through the air.
Speaker 1 00:02:56 Wow. That's amazing. And I remember that da Vinci also studied bird flying.
Speaker 0 00:03:01 Yeah, that's correct. Yeah. So well known fact that the Vinci studied bad flight, but few people know that he was the first to document and study flight maneuvers to get energy from the gradient of wind velocity and his 16th century manuscripts described birds, performing flight maneuvers. They became the basis for the study of aerodynamics. Wow.
Speaker 1 00:03:21 And what about plants? How are they connected also to this idea of learning from nature?
Speaker 0 00:03:27 Well, you know, the famous quote by the Greek physician Hippocrates that we use in symbiosis,
Speaker 1 00:03:33 Let food be thy medicine and let medicine be die. Food.
Speaker 0 00:03:36 Yeah, that's it. So speaking of medicinal foods, just as animals have different relationships with the plants that surround them, we have and should make use of our ancestral knowledge of plant properties and animals use plants as medicine that helps them feel better when they're not well. So I think we should cultivate that, which has beneficial for us.
Speaker 1 00:03:58 Yes, of course. And for the planet's health.
Speaker 0 00:04:00 Yeah, totally. I mean imagine thousands or even hundreds of years ago, our ancestors live close to nature and they understood that we were part of nature and they learned to differentiate the plants around them.
Speaker 1 00:04:13 Yes. It's our responsibility to maintain this knowledge and expand it. And if I can add my great grandmother was a herbal doctor. Oh yeah. What was her name? Great grandmother.
Speaker 0 00:04:26 Okay. And another great memetics fact, I believe it's pronounced. Did you know that it has been used for sound production and dance while I saw a beautiful piece by the Sydney based Australian dance data, which is really impressive. So well, art is always under the influence of nature.
Speaker 1 00:04:45 Well, in terms of artistic creation, aesthetics as Boris gross, one of my favorite authors said there's nothing comparable to a simple sunset.
Speaker 0 00:04:55 Well it said vessel and, uh, imagine design a sunset or as we said, design
Speaker 2 00:05:00 In the spring.
Speaker 1 00:05:03 Well, I love the E Cummings poem about remembering the spring all year long, always it's spring and everyone's in love and flowers.
