Bumbling about Brains

It might take $10,000 to get Naomi Campbell out of bed, but you can have me for the price of coffee, croissants and a fruit platter. I was back at Nesta this morning for another breakfast seminar, this time entitled “Biomimicry: Biology Inspires Innovation”.

Biomimicry means taking ideas from nature to inspire design and technology; why spend millions on research and development to answer a tricky physical problem when nature has already found the optimal solution? Evolution has created incredibly efficient structures, materials and systems that are proven success stories, if only in that the species sporting them are the surviving fittest! The idea of borrowing these solutions is not new—think of humans’ early attempts to fly that were modelled on birds wings—but today’s talk brought together three speakers to give short talks about their work on the theme, before the discussion was opened to the floor.

Rob Kesseler, from Central St Martins College, opened the day with some amazingly colourful electron micrograph images of seeds and pollen. Even at this tiny scale, structure and materials embody principles of efficient design.

We then heard from Alex Parfitt, Head of Materials Research at BAE Systems. Say what you want about the ethics of the defence industry, but they do some really cool biomimicry. Of the non-classified technologies up for discussion, we saw a bug-eye camera and a camouflaged truck that was inspired by cuttlefish. Cuttlefish are cool because they have fast-adapting camouflage. A fun theoretical aside: if you could neurally map their skin, you could play movies on their skin! But I digress… Inspired by this species, BAE have developed a truck covered with hexagonal plates that act like pixels; allowing the surface of the entire vehicle to change as it moves and camouflage with the surrounding environment.

The final speaker was Denise DeLuca from the futuristic-sounding Swedish Biomimetics 3000, who develop biomimetic innnovation projects with a strong focus on commercial viability. She has worked on both the public and private side, and spoke about the history of biomimicry and its potential role in the future; basically invoking it to tackle all of the world’s problems. Well, here’s hoping!

Moving to the question session, there was a lot of talk about sustainability. DeLuca proposed that nature is inherently sustainable because, well, we’re all still here. I wasn’t convinced that this is really relevant to how we can take ideas from nature—biomimicry—to design and build sustainable—in terms of resources—products and systems. Hopefully though, biomimicry can at least inspire a sense of connectedness with and respect for nature, as well as identifying efficient solutions.

A discussion of how to foster engagement between traditional disciplines also emerged, as the panel spoke of the difficulties of interaction between scientists/engineers and artists/designers as one of the major stumbling blocks on the path to innovation. Pretty much every academic discipline and industry stands to gain from interaction with other experts, and some ideas about facilitation and adaptation of education systems were floated in response. It seemed to me that biomimicry might actually be the closest thing we have to a poster child for cross-disciplinary research and interaction. The successes of biomimicry have already demonstrated the power of thinking and working across disciplines, and building from this might identify ways in which to encourage collaboration elsewhere.