By borrowing ideas from the world around us, biomimicry is stealing from the best.

In April, the Biomimicry Guild and the Rocky Mountain Institute released the beta version of the Biomimicry Design Portal, a digital library of designs based on processes that occur in the natural world.

When the final version is released later this year, the free, open-source database will be the first comprehensive collection of biomimetic research, unifying the growing community of innovators who are using nature as their muse.

When Janine Benyus published her book, Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature, in 1997, she brought together a diverse and disparate group of scientists, designers, engineers and environmentalists who were working in independent communities around the globe.

Although they didn’t know it at the time, they were all operating under a single guiding principle: that by creating designs based on natural systems, they could begin to develop a new generation of sustainable solutions.

Growing Up Quickly

Eleven years later, biomimicry—the practice to which Benyus gave a name—has become one of the most prevalent and influential design principles of the last century. Hundreds of creations, from microfibers to building designs, now take advantage of nature’s 3.8 billion years of research and development, imitating the way things work in the natural world in order to solve human problems.

According to Benyus, who co-founded the Biomimicry Guild, “when I wrote Biomimicry, the concept wasn’t organized by name. These days, it’s much more likely people will identify themselves as doing biomimetic work.”

As the practice becomes more ingrained in engineering and design methodologies, a surprising number of benefits are emerging. These include lower manufacturing costs, increased efficiency, reduced environmental impacts and positive consumer responses to bio-inspired products.

All of these advantages mean more companies are using a biomimetic approach when creating new products.

“There are myriad prototypes and specialty applications that have a tremendous potential to trickle down into our everyday lives over the next few years,” says Dr. Dayna Baumeister, co-founder of the Biomimicry Guild, who cites Qualcomm’s Morpho butterfly-inspired PDA displays, Sto’s lotus leaf-mimicking self-cleaning paint, Volvo’s locust-emulating crash avoidance system and Interface’s carpet tiles that imitate a forest floor, as some of the early designs already available to consumers.

Deep Roots

The idea of using Mother Nature as a muse can be traced as far back as Leonardo da Vinci, whose studies of various birds in the late 15th century led him to do a series of sketches of mechanical wings.

The practice has made periodic appearances ever since, with barbed wire (based on the thorny branches of the Osage orange tree) and Velcro (which mimics the hook-and-loop adhesion of burdock seeds) being two of its early applications.
But if biomimicry is such a good design principle, why did it take so long to come to prominence? According to Baumeister, much of it has to do with humans finally realizing that we need some help. “Biomimicry as a discipline is emerging today because it is becoming clear that we as a species don’t know all the answers about how to live on this planet, and we must begin to discover new solutions.”
As we learn more, we’re also realizing how much more there is to learn. Currently, the common practice is to replicate a single process, procedure or mechanism found in nature. The next step involves mimicking whole ecosystems and their intricate webs of interactions.

Once we’re able to do that, Benyus believes we’ll really be onto something: “Once we commit to do this kind of design, the next challenge is to do what happens in a forest. So taking the next step involves looking at the bigger processes and entire natural systems.”

And that’s when the real innovation begins.

In our unique interactive game, play matchmaker to a slew of bio-inspired designs (from Lotusan paint to the Eastgate Building in Zimbabwe to a Mercedes Benz concept car) and their natural sources for inspiration.