biomimicry @ ncm
Animal Art, StudiosAh Velcro, that scratchy, sticky stuff that keeps your shoes on your feet and closes that curtain upstairs in our Tech Studio. Velcro is everywhere and is one of the world’s most used fasteners.
Did you know the idea was borrowed from nature? Inspired by the burrs (a burr is a tiny seed pod with prickly hooks) he pulled from the fur of his dog, George de Mestral noticed how the natural hooks in the burr attached to his dog’s hair and set out to make a similar adhesive. Did you notice we use Velcro in our Improv Studio? Those bee costumes downstairs are created with Velcro stripes and once you bump into someone you get stuck! That’s Velcro and Mestral’s invention at work.
This idea is called biomimicry and innovators of science have been employing nature as inspiration to solve many of our world’s technological problems since the early 20th century.
But Velcro isn’t the only tool inspired by nature. Think about grass – it’s soft and plush and protects us from dirt and rocks, kind of like carpet in a house. Yet another example comes from Japan, where engineers wondered how to design a bullet train that would enter and leave tunnels soundlessly. So they looked to the kingfisher, a bird that dives soundlessly into water. By mimicking the long smooth shape of the bird’s beak, these engineers created a train design that made little to zero noise when entering a station.
Biomimicry is being used all over the modern world. For more cool examples of biomimicry, check out these sites:
http://brainz.org/15-coolest-cases-biomimicry/
http://www.biomimicryinstitute.org/
— Angella d’Avignon, Gallery Guide
Monday, November 30th, 2009 at 10:44 am and is filed under Animal Art, Studios. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
