Dayna Baumeister – Looking to Nature for Sustainable Design
An Introduction to Biomimicry, grades 9-12
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A lot of young people today are searching for ways to make a positive impact in the world. For those with an interest in nature, science, and / or design, Biomimicry may just be where it’s at! It is an approach to innovation that seeks sustainable solutions to human challenges by emulating nature’s time-tested patterns and strategies. The goal is to create products, processes, and policies—new ways of living—that are well-adapted to life on earth over the long haul. The core idea is that nature has already solved many of the problems we are grappling with. Animals, plants, and microbes are the consummate engineers.
About Dayna
Dayna Baumeister is the co-founder of Biomimicry 3.8, which is a socially responsible consulting firm that works in the field of Biomimicry. She also serves as the Director of the Biomimicry Center and Professor of Practice at Arizona State University where she brings Biomimicry to the university setting.
From her SPI recording
“What can we learn from how bees forage for pollen and design the best route for their day - and then apply it to designing the best route for delivery trucks? Or, how can we better manage traffic by looking at ants? How can we better manage the information decision-making by looking at distributed decision-making in termite mounds? So there are all these really fascinating application spaces. Building better security software by learning how the body actually deals with viruses. The list goes on and on and on. There’s really no shortage of places where one could ask the question, ‘What would nature do?’ “
She shares a case study:
“There was what used to be called the “Bullet Train” in Japan – it was called the Bullet Train because it went very fast and, of course, the front of it looked like the nose of a bullet. But they had a big problem in that as they went through tunnels – through mountains – that the super-fast train would create a big pressure wave inside the tunnel. Because it was moving so fast it was compressing the air in the tunnel and the tunnel can’t rid that air fast enough out of the little hole at the other end. So when the train comes out of the tunnel, it actually creates a sonic boom, which was not going over very well for the villagers living near the tunnel. So this was the big problem that they needed to solve in order to gain acceptance of the Bullet Train. One of the engineers on the project starts scratching his head. They’re trying to figure out all the different things that they can potentially do, like change the openings of tunnels, and so on. Eventually one day – he actually was a birder, in the evenings he liked to go out with his binoculars and look at birds - he noticed the kingfisher, which is a bird that dives into the water and catches fish. When the kingfisher dives in, it can’t startle the fish. So it can’t create a wave. It basically is going from one density medium - air - to another density medium - water - without creating any ripples and, in fact, if you take a still photograph of a kingfisher diving, there are no ripples on the water, which is so cool. So, of course, the fish don’t get scared and disappear. Well, if you look at a kingfisher beak it is a very long, narrow, very specific kind of beak that ultimately pierces the water in such a way that the rest of its body doesn’t. So, they took that same shape and put it on the nose of the train. It’s now called the Shinkansen train and you can find pictures of them online. It’s just like a kingfisher beak. Not only did it completely eliminate the sonic boom, it also improved the fuel efficiency of the trains by about three to five percent.”
There’s so much more!!
To listen to Dayna’s recording, click here.
To read a New Times article that relates to Biomimicry, click here.
Dayna’s full recording can be found at 4-12 Learning Lab / Science/ Earth and Environment.
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