Crowdsourcing Nature’s Design Solutions: Biomimicry Global Design Challenges
by Erin Connelly
Students at the German University of Cairo in Egypt noticed a big problem. Canals created to irrigate farms in their hometown were often infected with bacteria, trash, and worms. Inspired by the way that camels digest food, the students designed a new way of moving and filtering the water so that the dirty, stagnant canals could be transformed into a clean source of water for crops.
A year later and over 5,000 miles away, a team from McGill University in Montreal, Canada, realized that, if cargo ships were designed in a way that mimicked the methods that cuttlefish use to maintain buoyancy and stability, it would eliminate a huge problem of the current system—the spread of invasive species through ballast water.
These two innovations, developed as part of the Biomimicry Institute’s Biomimicry Global Design Challenges, are a small sampling of a movement whose drumbeat is getting louder each day. In the face of unprecedented ecological losses and frightening predictions for the future of our planet, big thinkers are realizing that the ultimate R&D laboratory is, in fact, all around us.
