V. semestar

This course will help students to explore how to design materials, products, processes, and economic and social networks with the help of models from the natural world, like organisms, communities, ecosystems, the biosphere.
 
The key is to look for models to eventually extract principles of design that then can be applied in a human context.  The key reason one would want to be a biomimicry designer is to make human needs more aligned with sustaining the biosphere and all layers of it because without such sustainability humans will not be around in this world for as long as we could. Naturally therefore, biomimicry is very interdisciplinary as is already visible by looking at existing related sciences like Bionics, Biomimetics, and Bio-nanotechnology. Biomimicry is nature-based innovation and invention, it helps us to be more creative. Studying biomimicry also makes it very clear that all life, including humans, are “slaves” to certain boundaries which are determined by the Earth’s conditions of operation. The ideal of biomimicry is to finally get all human endeavor to be in line with the very basic and also not-to-be-violated Life’s principle, e.g maintain live-romoting conditions or perfect recycling (re-using, upcycling). One of the most basic lessons to learn in this class is that life must be energy efficient, can not be based on harmful substances and must evolve and adapt to the dynamic changes on Earth.
Designing new products and businesses (industry) based on Life’s principles enables us to adapt and to benefit from global changes and will prevent us from causing such global changes that harm us and also other life forms.  Although global processes are at stake, the best way to get there is to think and act locally.
 
The fun part of learning biomimicry is to realize the genius of nature. You will discover the amazingly broad spectrum of problem solutions that we as humans can learn from if we allow ourselves to be inspired by the know-how of the at least 30 million species that are with us currently on this planet and by learning from their higher order associations which they formed over 3.8 billion years of life on earth. In fact, I don’t think there is any human-society problem we encounter that could not be solved by looking at solutions in natural systems or parts of it, like among others, organisms, organs, surface structures and behaviours. Natural systems are designed to support the life not least because they rely on multi-functionality, adaptation, waste-free operation, networking, communication, feedback and many more simple but crucial principles that we as humans need to discover and eventually apply in our societies if we want to sustain ourselves as one of the millions of species on earth.