Biomimicry: hippy nonsense or corporate game-changer?

Biomimicry might sound like the latest hippy craze inviting eco-warriors to behave like trees swaying in the breeze, but it in fact refers to an emerging design trend that is rapidly gaining traction in some of the most hard-nosed corporate environments.

The concept boils down to an understanding that engineers and designers should copy nature to solve human problems, and while it has mainly been the preserve of academics in the past, it is fast emerging as a tangible way for businesses to improve their green credentials and drive design innovation, according to biomimicry expert Janine Benyus.

Speaking at a roundtable event in London last week hosted by InterfaceFLOR, an international carpet tile manufacturer that has become a somewhat unlikely convert to the biomimicry cause, Benyus said that growing numbers of blue chip firms are now frequently drawing on sustainable design principles that have been developed by studying plants and animals.

InterfaceFLOR, for example, hailed biomimicry for helping to create its most popular product line: non-directional carpet tiles that have been modelled on the rainforest floor. The company says that the design creates less than one per cent of the installation waste compared to standard tiles, and the tiles are also faster to install and easier to replace.

Benyus, who founded the not-for-profit research centre the Biomimicry Institute and the Biomimicry Guild consultancy, explains that any business keen to draw on natural design principles must first start by properly auditing their current products and their environmental impacts.

Reaching for a visible example, she says: "You might take a digital recorder and you begin to investigate it and ask questions such as: 'Is it free of toxic material? Is it self-healing? Was it created in a benign manufacturing plant?' and the answer to each will be 'No.'"

Benyus says that asking direct questions allows any business to identify the sustainable design challenges it faces and then work out how the natural world could help to provide answers.

"As you ask yourself these questions, you get a long list of new design challenges, so ideally what you do is go through a spiral in which you create something and test it against life's principles, and where it fell short you would ask nature how it would make it self-healing so you don't have to replace it again," she says.

This auditing and design process can be improved through the appointment of a trained biologist to the design team, according to Benyus. "The people who make our world, such as engineers and architects, are not trained in biology," she argues.

"They don't really know how life filters, procures, handles compressive forces, how life creates pigment without toxic pigments, how life manufactures, they don't know how life generates energy."

In print, Benyus's comments sound like the kind of tree-hugging rhetoric bound to get right up the noses of serious-minded business executives. But in practice biomimicry principles have been shown to help provide workable solutions to a large number of design challenges. Moreover, the Biomimicry Guild counts firms such a Procter & Gamble, Kraft, Nike and General Electric among its clients, suggesting that plenty of blue chip firms are starting to take the concept seriously.

Benyus predicts that the next big biomimetic product to make it to market will be a self-cleaning exterior paint called Lotusan, which is modelled on the bumpy texture of a lotus leaf and cleans itself using rainwater.

She also hails the potential for a synthetic surface, known as Sharklet, that was inspired by the skin of sharks and is designed to limit the risk of kitchen surfaces being colonised by disease-causing microbes.

In addition to individual products there are signs that biomimicry is winning converts at a municipal level, with Benyus having recently worked with architectural giant HOK on a master plan for a brand new sustainable city in India and proposals to give a green facelift to a major Chinese city.