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Biomimicry Design Frameworks for Nature-Inspired Innovation

biomimicry biomimicry thinking design frameworks Jul 29, 2023

Whether you start with biological inspiration that leads to a design, or whether you start with a challenge and then look to nature for design solutions, there are 4 key phases/steps in the practice of biomimicry. Biomimicry is fundamentally a translation between nature and design, and in today’s article, we’ll focus on the two design frameworks for applying biomimicry.

Biomimicry Design Frameworks

Also known as Biomimicry Thinking and the Biomimicry Design Methodology

The 4 key stages in the Biomimicry Thinking / Design framework are:

DISCOVER: Discover the strategies and mechanisms.
EXPLORE: Explore the functions and the context.
CREATE: Create designs inspired by the organism.
EVALUATE: Evaluate your design using Life’s Principles.

Okay, so that seems similar to the Design Thinking framework, and at first glance it is. Biomimicry Framework differs radically from Design Thinking though. This is because biomimicry is orientated around functions and context.

Hint: That’s the heart of biomimicry (functions and context).

How do you do biomimicry:

There are two formal ways to do biomimicry, and both ways integrate all 4 design stages:

Biology to Design, and
DISCOVER > EXPLORE > CREATE > EVALUATE
Challenge to Biology
EXPLORE > DISCOVER > CREATE > EVALUATE

Biomimicry Design Framework 1:
Biology to Design

Biology to Design is where you are inspired by a biological organism/ecosystem and then go about identifying where you can apply that inspiration into design.

The Biology to Design Framework follows these four stages:

1. DISCOVER
Discover the natural model, its strategies and its mechanisms.
- You could abstract a design principle here, but only if you know what is relevant.
That may only come later once you have identified a clear design application.

2. EXPLORE
Explore & identify the function and context in which your natural model operates, and bridge that to a similar function and context in human design.

3. CREATE
After abstracting the relevant design principle(s), brainstorm potential applications and then integrate the principle(s) into your final design.

4. EVALUATE
Prototype or evaluate your design(s) against Life's Principles.
This may lead to revisiting one or more of these 4 stages again.

What does this look like in practice?

Biomimicry Framework Example - Biology to Design:

What can we learn from Gecko’s feet?
🎬 This video explains the insights best.

It’s well known that geckos attach to surfaces effectively. The University of Massachusetts researchers figured out a revolutionary mechanism through their research.

DISCOVER

Discover the natural model, its strategies and its mechanisms.

A team of polymer scientists and a biologist set out to ask the question: What can we learn from Geckos? This led to a better understanding of exactly how the gecko does it, leading them to invent Geckskin, a device that can hold +300 kg on a smooth wall.

Strategy: Geckos can adhere to surfaces in any orientation, without the use of chemical adhesives.

Mechanism: Microscopic spatula-shaped “hairs” on the feet invoke Van Der Waals forces – the adhesive forces between objects at the molecular level. The microscopic hairs make a layer that is soft enough to create a high contact surface area, increasing the Van Den Waals adhesion force.

The insight: By looking at the gecko as a whole and not just the tiny hairs which were assumed to be the key function. The researchers looked at the underlying anatomy, including the tendons and soft tissue of the skin. The tendons underlying the hairs are of a stiff enough material to ensure that the soft outer layer stays stretched out and to overcome the force of the soft material’s inherent elastic properties to “bounce back” or be repelled by the surface. This is known as draping adhesion.

Zooming in helps us to better understand key biological functions.
Reference: Gecko Adhesion as a Model System for Integrative Biology, Interdisciplinary Science, and Bioinspired Engineering. Autumn et al. (2014).

Tip: Perhaps this is an obvious point but it is worth sharing, the Discovery phase and the resulting insights are fundamental to achieving a Biology to Design framework. Without any key insights, you will be unable to move beyond this phase.

EXPLORE

Explore the underlying functions and the (similar) context

The next step was to identify the underlying function & context:

Function: To form a strong attachment, temporarily (using form/physics, no chemical adhesives)
Context: Solid dry surfaces (not dusty or sandy), natural or manmade, rigid or flexible, flat or contoured

CREATE

Abstract the design principle (using function, context, strategy & mechanism to guide you). Create designs that are inspired by the model’s abstracted design principle.

Abstracted design principle: Replicate the material properties of the gecko’s foot: with an outer soft, rubbery material, which increases the contact area’s Van Der Waals adhesion force, supported by a stiff material layer to create draping adhesion.

Design: Create a new fabric that has a smooth rubbery adhesive layer with a stiff supporting fabric.

The end result is an adhesive device that is powerful, easily removed, leaves no residue and is not produced using expensive nanotechnology.

Hint: Don’t stop at one idea – iterate and apply the design principle to a number of different ideas and possible contexts.

EVALUATE

Evaluate your design using Biomimicry Life’s Principles. You can also integrate Life’s Principles as part of the design process, in order to improve your product as you go along, making it more robust and well-adapted.

The researchers went on to test and prototype their creations, and the outcome was simply brilliant.

The outcome: The use of simple materials in a very novel way.

The key innovation by the Geckskin team was to create a strong adhesive material using everyday materials. This was achieved by understanding the material properties that enable adhesion, and emulating these at a larger scale by creating an integrated adhesive fabric with a soft pad woven into a stiff fabric, This allows the pad to drape over a surface to maximize contact and doesn’t rely on nanotechnology. As in natural gecko feet, this design has strong adhesive properties and maintains stiffness and rotational freedom.

Why this innovation works: It gets close enough to the surface that the Van der Waals interactions can become strong. It can hold 300 kg on an index card-size pad. With a simple twist of the pad, it peels off with minimal force, and it doesn't mark the service at all. One of the really important things is that you can do this over and over and over again.

A valuable next stage for these research and development teams would be an evaluation of their designs against the Biomimicry Life’s Principles, to identify how to make their products more life-friendly, adaptive, attuned and responsive, resilient, circular, etc.

Biomimicry Design Framework 2:
Challenge to Biology

Challenge to Biology is where you begin with a challenge to solve or a design to create and you deliberately look to nature for design inspiration or for how to solve the challenge.

The 4 steps of the Challenge to Biology method:

EXPLORE - Explore the human design challenge in depth. Identify the function(s), context(s) and scale(s) that form the parameters of your challenge.
DISCOVER - Search extensively to discover the natural model(s) that match your criteria, then find their strategies and mechanisms.
Use these, as well as function & context cues, to develop your abstracted design principles).
CREATE - Using the abstracted design principle as a basis, brainstorm some ideas for your design solution.
Numerous models and abstracted design principles can be integrated into your design. Keep in mind the distilled function and context of your challenge.
EVALUATE - Evaluate your design(s) against Life's Principles. This may lead to revisiting one or more of these 4 stages again.

Notice how Step 1 and Step 2 are swapped around from Biology to Design. We first need to fully understand the design challenge (EXPLORE) before we can move on to looking for biological inspiration for solutions (DISCOVER).

Let's explain this with an applied example of this biomimicry framework.

Challenge to Biology Framework Example: Slips

EXPLORE

Explore the human design challenge in depth. Identify the function(s), context(s) and scale(s) that form the parameters of your challenge.

“Rather than finding an interesting technology and having no idea how it is applicable, now we start with a problem and look for technologies to address it.”
- Joanna Aizenberg, Harvard Wyss Institute.

This was the case with Harvard researcher Joanna Aizenberg’s group’s work on the omniphobic surfaces known as SLIPS, short for slippery liquid-infused porous surfaces. They were on the hunt for materials that could repel both oil and water to create surfaces for handling biomedical fluids, transporting fuel, preventing biofouling, and repelling water to prevent ice formation. Existing “non-stick” surface coatings were only partially effective, and were particularly ineffective against challenges such as bacteria and colonizing microorganisms.

The pitcher plant has developed an extremely slippery surface that can trap insects. The surfaces of Nepenthes pitcher plant rims are super-slippery thanks to a microtextural roughness, with tiny pores that lock in a lubricating layer of water. When unlucky insects walk on this slick surface, they cannot hold onto this low-friction surface and they fall into digestive juices at the bottom of the plant’s bloom. How’s that for millions of years of evolution?