On the afternoon of March 26th, the Tällberg Foundation, together with partners KTH and VINNOVA, welcomed Janine Benyus, president of the Biomimicry Institute, to Stockholm, Sweden. Janine spoke to an audience of over 70 from many areas of Stockholms academic, business, and policy communities. Anders Wijkman, Member of the European Parliament, introduced Janine as an author, speaker and advisor to industry and governments who has brought inspiration to industrial designers and innovation teams around the world for many years. He stressed the importance of her thinking. Climate change heightens our urgent need to break out from a reliance on energy intensive processes that produce waste, stress ecosystems and strip the planet of precious resources. Opening her talk, Janine introduced Biomimicry, a term she coined. It begins with learning about Nature, but then takes the second step of learning FROM nature. This knowledge of natural processes then inspires a completely different approach to technology, materials and production processes.
A set of principles underpin Biomimicry that explain how life, which has been evolving for 3.8 billion years, creates conditions that are conducive to life. Natural processes use as little energy as possible; they produce no waste – all by-products are consumed by a nearby natural process and are never hazardous to the source organism; Nature conducts its chemistry in water; and Nature uses a small subset of the elements that can be obtained nearby. This contrasts to the human developed industrial manufacturing processes which typical use “heat, beat, and treat” methods of high temperature, high pressure and a cocktail of additive chemicals of varying toxicity, extracted from all corners of the earth.
Janine gave a wealth of examples of modern technology inspired by natural designs that evolved to perfection over hundreds of thousand of years. She showed revolutionary technologies already in practice including gecko-inspired adhesives and leaf-inspired solar cells, and showcased research and development in progress in many, many other fields.
Her talk covered the importance for both students of design, engineering and business, as well as those in industry, to learn about nature’s solutions to functions such as pumping, filtering, collecting and purifying water, generating energy, minimising waste, preventing decay and disease, etc. She is working on a database of these functions for designers, and this will be prepared together with Google. A large collection of Janine’s work is available on the web at her two sites –
Following on from her talk, Janine joined a panel conversation with Gunnel Dalhammar, KTH Environmental Microbiology, Carl Mossfeldt, CEO of Tällberg Advisors and Andre Heinz, of the Stockholm-based Sustainable Technologies Fund. The discussion included comments and questions from the audience and addressed the challenges of bringing a sustainable approach to design into mainstream industry at the speed necessary to meet the challenge of climate change. The conversation covered innovative teaching methods and the structure of educational courses, the need to reach the investment community and the value of supportive public policy. There was agreement that the principles of biomimicry should be introduced to research and development both within academia and industry, using tools such as the ISO standards. The panel was moderated by Ulla-Britt Fräjdin-Hellqvist, an Associated Tällberg Advisor. Bo Ekman, Founder of the Tällberg Foundation, closed the seminar with a reflection on the challenge ahead. Without a fundamental change in our attitude to ecosystems, based on humility and understanding, not even wonderful ideas like biomimicry can redress the imbalances in our system that are leading to climate change.