Biomimicry: Think and Create Naturally | Jamie Miller | TEDxCollingwood
Jamie Miller |
TEDxCollingwood
• October 2018
Dell said that 85% of the jobs that will exist in 2030 do not exist today. This means that a new economy will emerge and that exiting companies and industries that lack resilience to change will be forced to either be disrupted or join the disruption. In this wave of uncertainty there exists a time-tested model and mentor for creating some of the most efficient and sustainable forms, processes and systems - nature. In this talk, Jamie explores biomimicry and the ways that we can shift our designs by shifting the thinking that shapes those designs. Think for example, of walls that can breathe like skin, buildings that can self-heal, and communities that generate zero waste like a forest. By leveraging emerging technologies, these far-fetched ideas are much more likely than we realize. And, in a world of wicked problems, biomimicry is helping us reframe our interpretation of design, inviting us to tap into our own creative freedom, creatively explore nature's forms processes and systems, to inspire new jobs, and new ideas, that shift our built systems towards greater harmony with nature.
Jamie has been obsessed with biomimicry since his 2004 math and poetry class first opened his eyes to the Fibonacci sequence. Since then, he's been exploring the influence of our thinking on our designs - doing a PhD in engineering which focused on systems-level biomimicry and urban resilience - and learning to apply biomimicry to the built environment through his consultancy, Biomimicry Frontiers. In 2018 he also started the Biomimicry Commons, which is an incubator and disruptor space that's dedicated to supporting biomimicry technologies and start-ups and helping established industries evolve. Jamie was trained by Janine Benyus, the woman who coined the term "biomimicry" back in 2007 and ever since has been pushing the way we think, behave, and create through the lens of nature.