In the race to constantly design faster, better and more efficient machines, sometimes we forget that the answers to many of the most confusing questions lie among us, in the form of our natural environment. Nature is an excellent designer, as each of her tweaks and turns somehow adhere to the physics and exact requirements of the immediate environment, so why rack our brains to conjure complicated formulas when we can take some help and inspiration from our surroundings?
A little more than ten years ago, an MIT graduate named Mark Miles, while flipping through a magazine noticed the striking blue colour of the Morpho butterflies- now this wouldn’t come of much interest to someone in the field of micro-electromechanical, but what happened to stand out to Miles was the thought that the blue on the butterfly’s wings did not come from pigment (which would use up far too much energy to be sustainable) but an assemblage of tiny shingle plates on the butterfly’s wings that are arranged in such a manner that they disrupt the light wavelengths to create a magnificent blue.
From a little butterfly, Miles got the inspiration to make electronic device displays that similarly manipulate light to reproduce vivid colour, with his developments now using this technology in mirasol displays, that consume one-tenth of the power of an LCD reader.
Another popular example of the use of biomimicry in commercial design is in the bullet trains. Japanese engineers were struck by an odd problem; when entering tunnels, the trains caused a massive amount of noise due to the displacement of air, creating large shockwaves that caused damage to several tunnels. To combat this odd problem, the engineers took inspiration from the kingfisher bird’s beak; a beak specialized to dive into the water at great speeds while making minimal splashes.
By changing and modelling the shinkansen’s (bullet train) nose to be more like a kingfisher, not only was the tunnel sound eradicated, but the trains were 10% faster and consumed 15% less energy as well.
Biomimicry shows us that just by being a little more in tune and aware of our surroundings we can learn how to think smarter, not harder. The answers are already there, we just have to find them.
Why rack our brains to conjure complicated formulas when we can take some help and inspiration from our surroundings?
