Teachable Moment: How Can a Butterfly Inspire Your Next Design?

AskNature.org is a newly launched website that serves as a tool to architects, designers, and engineers specializing in biomimicry, and anyone else involved in product, packaging, and service design. Biomimicry (a new term to us, too) pairs biologists with designers to develop sustainable solutions inspired by real-life functions that have been developed and perfected in nature throughout time. So that a designer attempting to create product features that assemble, dissemble, filter, absorb, convert energy, detoxify, and a thousand other things, can look to nature’s little miracles for sustainable solutions. For example, understanding the make-up of a toucan’s beak - strong, yet lightweight, due to a rigid foamy inside and layers of fibrous keratin tile outside – can help an engineer create structural functions.

Why We Like It:
The viewpoint of biomimicry encourages one to look to nature for the most brilliant inventions in our world. Instead of creating toxic products that pollute, designers who practice biomimicry are respecting nature both by looking to its ingenuity for solutions and by protecting the environment with the creation of sustainable products. If we could all look to nature as our wise mentor, we’d certainly be more careful to conserve and protect our natural habitats.