Bionics/Biomimetics/Biomimicry
Get flash to fully experience Pearltrees
Nervous System
Nervous System is a generative design studio that works at the intersection of science, art, and technology. We create using a novel process that employs computer simulation to generate designs and digital fabrication to realize products. Drawing inspiration from natural phenomena, we write computer programs based on processes and patterns found in nature and use those programs to create unique and affordable art, jewelry, and housewares.
A Living Architecture
The interactive Photoskin Wall can be configured in two ways: completely Analog or using Firefly. In the Analog configuration , the wall responds directly to sensor data with one mode of behavior. An Arduino, Firefly and computer are not required. The wall just needs a power source such as batteries. The pores are organized into quads to minimize hardware. Click Read More to view drawings of the Analog configuration.Andy Payne, LIFT architects, has published a 150-page manual to help people get a basic understanding of Grasshopper. This primer and other tutorials are available on our Tutorials page... Here is a recording of the Into to Grasshopper Webinar by David Rutten and the supporting files .
Grasshopper
Evolutionary Computing
Learning from Trees and Bones How to Optimize Strength and Materials The next time you drive through a forest, go ahead and thank the trees out your window for helping on your car's crash safety and gas mileage. Trees engineer themselves in a number of ways to maximize their strength, such as arranging their fibers to minimize stress and adding material where strength is needed (take a look at the extra material beneath a heavy branch, for instance). Bones – unlike trees in that they must carry moving loads – go a step further by removing material where it's not needed, optimizing their structure for their dynamic workloads. Engineers have incorporated these and other lessons learned from how trees and bones optimize their strength and minimize their use of materials into software design programs, such as Claus Matteck's “Soft Kill Option” software, which are revolutionizing industrial design.
Biomimicry Institute - Industrial Design
Nature's elegant solutions to building challenges include the Scots pine's adaptive growth, the thorny devil's passive water collection, and a leaf's on-site energy production. AskNature can help you solve your design challenges. Learn more
Ask Nature - the Biomimicry Design Portal: biomimetics, architecture, biology, innovation inspired by nature, industrial design - Ask Nature - the Biomimicry Design Portal: biomimetics, architecture, biology, innovation inspired by nature, industrial desi
TED biomimicry
Biomimetics - National Geographic Magazine
One cloudless midsummer day in February, Andrew Parker, an evolutionary biologist, knelt in the baking red sand of the Australian outback just south of Alice Springs and eased the right hind leg of a thorny devil into a dish of water. The maneuver was not as risky as it sounds: Though covered with sharp spines, the lizard stood only about an inch high at the shoulder, and it looked up at Parker apprehensively, like a baby dinosaur that had lost its mother. It seemed too cute for its harsh surroundings, home to an alarmingly high percentage of the world's most venomous snakes, including the inland taipan, which can kill a hundred people with an ounce of its venom, and the desert death adder, whose name pretty well says it all.