Green: At a School Near You

Most people accept that we live in an unsustainable world, leaving the green movement to those who buy hybrid cars and recycle regularly. Sustainable living and design haven't become quite as universal as many of us would like. Luckily, the latest crop of architecture and design students might be able to effect some change with the introduction of biomimetics to the curriculum in undergraduate and graduate coursework. Biomimetics?also known as bio-inspired design, bionics, and biomimicry?allows us to look to nature not just for inspiration but also for lessons on how to design a sustainable world. The study of the lotus leaf's surface texture has led to the design of self-cleaning surfaces, for example. If a surface can clean itself, then it doesn't need chemical cleansers, which makes it sustainable. Biomimetics has been recognized as a new paradigm for architects and designers, and its study is being incorporated into design education.

Today's schools aren't just sticking to academics; they're looking around at what's missing. "The architecture curriculum is changing by the need to improve environmental conditions," says Chris Jarrett, associate director and associate professor of the architecture program at Georgia Institute of Technology. "And coursework is shaping itself to suit the interests of the students." A year ago, Georgia Tech started a Center for Biologically Inspired Design and is currently sponsoring a solar decathlon where universities and colleges compete to design a homeostatic, solar-powered house. Jarrett predicts that biomimetics, which is still considered somewhat marginal, will be a regular part of design education within the next decade.

Biomimetics courses typically are interdisciplinary and include architecture, biology, mechanical engineering, textile engineering, material science, and industrial systems engineering. "Biomimetics is a mediation tool that allows us to have conversations across disciplines," says Bruce Hinds, assistant professor of design at Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto and an architect by profession. "It opens up new ideas, allows students to be visionary and at least moves them in the direction of asking the right questions." So far, students at the school have been very receptive to its study. "If students walked out tomorrow into their practice, they'd be able to create multidisciplinary teams like IDEO does to come up with new designs," says Hinds.

For Jeannette Yen, a scientist, professor in the school of biology, and director for Biologically Inspired Design at Georgia Tech, one of the advantages of teaching biomimetics is that it allows students from different disciplines to feed off one another and to appreciate each other's fields. For example, "studying the Gecko has helped in the development of non-toxic adhesives, but it also means we'll appreciate the lizard more," says Yen. With a specialty in biological oceanography, Yen is presently studying underwater communication and the use of animals' odors in the sea as signals. "Perhaps this will inspire the design of a sensor for underwater vehicles," Yen explains.

Students are, in large part, exploring nature's lessons on the metaphoric level when it comes to designing buildings, but there's room for direct application, too. "Biomimicry works well at the scale of products such as looking at a spider web's strength to come up with a way to produce fabric," says John Carmody, director of the center of sustainable building research and professor of architecture at the University of Minnesota College of Design. "The point of studying biomimetics isn't for literal interpretation but rather for it to provoke a different way of thinking so it leads to different design approaches." The hope is that unique thinking will produce unique work.

There is one great example of a building whose sustainable design comes straight from nature: Eastgate Building in Harare, Zimbabwe. Its passive ventilation employs the same heating and cooling principles as a termite mound, whose temperature even in Zimbabwe is always regulated with the constant opening and closing of vents. The building doesn't need HVAC and uses less than 10 percent of the energy of a conventional building its size.

Biomimetics is still an evolving discipline, but surely the sharing of knowledge across fields will only make architecture and design students better at what they do, whether that be designing an office tower or the fabric on a chair. If it weren't for nature's inspiration, we might not have Velcro.