NEO Biomimicry Examples

Comment

Comment by Brad Charles Melzer on August 30, 2010 at 2:02pm

Filtrexx is based in Grafton. We are a carbon negative company that are leaders in the field for erosion control and stormwater management. We also produce agricultural systems that are innovative, inexpensive, low maintainance, low water usage, divert solid waste from landfills, and remediate soils. We do all of this by utilizing nature as our template. We implement biomimicry on a large scale to conserve soils, restore environments, and grow food.
All of our technologies and products are backed by research and data that has been conducted by third parties and has been featured in major scientific journals and trade publications.

We also have a non profit arm and do a wide range of work locally to bolster NEO's food security. We grow food at our site that gets harvested by and donated to volunteers working for various community organizations such as churches and local food shelves. We seek out grants to help install community gardens for populations such as Somali Bantu refugees. We partnered with Open Door Church and others to install 300 gardens in one day.

Check out our websites... Call us... Contact us for a presentation...Come visit sometime...

www.filtrexx.com

www.gardensoxx.com

Comment by Chris Weigand on July 20, 2010 at 9:20pm

Interesting article, not sure if we posted it before.
http://www.fastcompany.com/1648801/biomimicry-challenge-smart-desig...


Our biomimicry challenge What Would You Ask Nature? drew dozens of real-world business problems submitted by companies from all over the world. We assigned three challenges to three firms and paired them each with a biologist. Each team is now reporting their bio-inspired solutions.

Designers Accord

You've probably seen ads for IBM's SmarterCity initiative, a program that uses the company's information technology to help municipal governments create healthier, more intelligent urban environments for their residents. Using their ability to collect and analyze data, IBM is able to provide information about elements of daily city life ranging from weather and traffic to water usage and air quality. But what they've done with that data has largely been used to make policy and economic decisions. IBM appealed to our What Would You Ask Nature? biomimicry challenge, asking how they could use nature to understand how these overlays of information could help guide residents toward making better personal decisions for the good of the city. A New York-based team at Smart Design accepted their challenge.

After having a discussion with IBM, and walking through some day-in-the-life exercises that explored issues facing urban dwellers, Smart chose to focus on water conservation. Because of the complexity surrounding its systems, water is often misunderstood, says Tucker Fort, Smart's director of industrial design. "But unlike something like energy, it's a finite resource." Water was also something that residents interacted with everyday, and since IBM's goal was to make cities more responsive and resilient, using a biomimetic approach for encouraging more responsible water usage could have a real impact when implemented across an entire municipal area. Smart zeroed in on urban water consumption to explore how nature could inspire relevant, everyday solutions for city inhabitants to conserve water.

blindfolding exercise

To immerse themselves in a biomimetic mindset, Fort, along with director of interaction design Ted Booth, and their team consisting of Whitney Hopkins, Colin Kelly, Anton Ljunggren, and Stephanie Yung, were introduced to the emerging discipline of biomimicry by their BaDT (biologist at the design table) Mark Dorfman. After a biomimicry primer, the team engaged in a blindfolded exercise where they were encouraged to smell, taste, touch, and listen to nature--anything that would break them of their reliance on vision. This is something Dorfman calls "quieting our cleverness." "If I were to show you a pine cone, you would see it and immediately know what it is, and that might be the end of your curiosity and exploration," says Dorfman. "But if you're blindfolded and handed a pine cone, you'll have to explore its shape, texture, smell, before figuring out what it is." The hope is that this process will open the designer's mind to viewing living things through a functional lens--a way that is particularly relevant to solving design challenges.

High Line

Visits to two urban greenways, the High Line and Hudson River Park, near Smart's offices, provided an opportunity to use this sensual awareness while focusing intently on natural solutions. Reframing the challenge as a functional approach, the designers asked themselves questions like "How does nature store water?" and "How does nature collect water?" Through Dorfman's storytelling and by looking at examples on the AskNature.org site, they learned about examples that ranged from the corky tuber, a giant 700-pound water-filled tuber that grows under the ground yet throws out a few tiny shoots on the surface to alert animals about its water levels, to the ways that camels self-regulate water consumption due to availability.

Although the designers were inspired by the natural examples, they quickly found a

Comment by craig Limpach on January 28, 2010 at 2:31pm

Successfully emulating Nature is a surrender of preconcieved ideas and habits. Nature is the great teacher. Only when one abandons desire to control and force temporary solutions that attempt to manage Nature can one truly be "sustainable". Successful design comes from humilty and a willingness to learn a different way. Man being the pinacle of evolution is dangerous propaganda from a dying paradigm of spiritual/economic conquest.

Comment by Lisa Hong on January 17, 2010 at 5:04pm

Looking to nature's dynamic ecosystem model of resources, diversity, niches, interdependence, conflict and synergies when convening people around action-oriented ideas. Identifying likely parts of an idea's "ecosystem" and working towards enabling a balanced system of collaborative participants. Recognizing that in nature, those who don't participate in, contribute to, and evolve/adapt with the system find themselves excluded and evolve toward extinction and away from vitality. Ecosystems thrive by moving forward with species that adapt to new conditions; they don't generally don't stop to wait for or include species who cannot keep pace with the changes.