Articles, Service Design, Strategic Innovation, sustainability

This past summer, I left my apartment in Milan, Italy for a farm in Normandy, France; That’s right – I voluntarily traded Prada for permaculture. Little did I know that I was leaving a design capital to get a serious design lesson.

Rubber boots and metal sheers in tow, I was ready to heave and hoe (and all the other farm-appropriate gestures) my way along the learning curve – my green thumb had previously been limited to some potted basil and a few house plants. I expected organic farming on a large scale would be complicated. I didn’t realize it would be so inspiring.

This farm used permaculture, a design method that mimics the architecture and relationships in natural ecologies to develop sustainable agricultural practices. In other words, the organic ‘food forest’ (which requires zero fossil fuels) was bursting with diverse produce, wild flowers and life, thanks to the network of ecosystems nurtured within it. With a bit of nature-inspired design, a sustainable and rich ecosystem was created and did an unbelievable job at contributing to its own maintenance.

I was fascinated and unbelievably curious – farming is an obvious place to mimic nature’s design, but what about business? What about manufacturing, packaging and services? After all, 3.8 billion years of R&D later and we can’t deny that nature is the authority on the design of sustainable systems.

The interwebs led me to Bio-Mimicry, a design discipline committed to developing sustainable solutions by emulating nature’s time-tested patterns and strategies.

What can inter-species cooperation and competition teach us about building communities? What can the butterfly’s wings teach us about self-cleaning material? What can wind-turbines learn from flying birds? How would nature heat and cool a home? These are the kinds of questions BioMimicry seeks to answer – and with cool open-source projects like The Biomimicry Institutes’ AskNature,, the answers are right at our fingertips.

At a time when the often-daunting task of designing for sustainability is a top priority for many businesses, this is especially intriguing. Biomimicry can be a powerful tool for innovation on the road to more sustainable designs and processes. Nature can demonstrate the underlying simplicity of seemingly complicated processes – so take another look, what can you learn from your own backyard?

Ps. Intrigued? Check out this great TED talk video for examples of how nature is already inspiring design.