Biomimicry and the nature of wellness
How does the rest of the natural world stay healthy?
It’s a question I don’t think I’ve really pursued. I sort of take it for granted that there are no hospitals in a forest, no physicians resetting broken bones, or epidemiologists to manage outbreaks. There are no mental health specialists or administered medicines as we understand them. When I stop to really think about healthcare in the natural world, I realize that the way nature supports health is very different than the way we do and, admittedly, I don’t know much about it.
But that’s really the joy of biomimicry, it’s an opportunity to learn something new.
Biomimicry: innovation inspired by nature
By definition, biomimicry is innovation inspired by nature. It’s a new term for a very old idea. Whether it’s copying the hooking mechanism of burrs to make Velcro or the bumps on a humpback whale fins to improve turbine blades, the concept acknowledges that after nearly four billion years of evolution, the life that we see on this planet may have some incredible ideas for how to thrive here.
Biomimicry invites us to step outside our preconceptions for how to solve problems and invites us to ask nature. In her seminal book, Biomimicry: Innovation inspired by nature, Janine Benyus writes about Kenneth Glander from Duke University who housed lemurs in a forest that was about 14 thousand kilometers from their natural home in Madagascar. He was convinced that, “you could let these animals roam in these woods without fear of them poisoning themselves on our mushrooms. Even though people die from eating mushrooms all the time, I had a hunch these primates were smarter than that.” They were and are. And so are a lot of other species.
In the 1950s, John Hopkins’s researcher Curt Richter dismantled rat food into its constituent parts: proteins, oils, fats, sugars, salt, yeast, etc. The rats had access to an abundance of each part but what surprised Richter was that instead of gorging on few more exciting elements, the rats procured a diet that, with fewer calories, allowed them to grow faster and maintain greater health than the original aggregation provided. The rats had composed a better nutritional diet than the humans who engineered their food.
Biophilia in healthcare design
We know that most of our medicines started by studying nature or having a deeper relationship with the land. We know that everything we’ve ever needed has come from the earth – food, water, materials - including the things that keep us healthy.
As a species, we have an innate connection to the natural world, which makes a lot of sense since our species has spent most of our time in deep connection with nature and is itself a part of nature. It’s only through the rise of our built environments that we’ve separated ourselves from nature and in doing so somewhat dulled our senses to our environments. But we are seeing a rise in the importance of a natural connection, in large part because of biophilic research.
New research has shown that having plants in our buildings, feeling breezes or hearing running water, adding natural smells and stochastic events, non-rhythmic stimuli, dynamic light, natural materials, or biomorphic forms can all greatly increase our wellbeing, lower our heart rate, improve healing times, and even enhance concentration and productivity. Through biophilia we are learning just how important it is to have nature in our spaces for health. But what biomimicry can do is to help us understand how important it can be to have nature also influence our design thinking.
A hopeful future
The true power of biomimicry is in the way it makes us rethink the mental models we use to solve problems. The problems we face today have no precedent for how to solve them. In resilience literature, things like Covid-19 and climate change are referred to as “wicked problems” because of their complexity, uncertainty, high stakes, and urgency. They challenge our existing paradigms and force us to recognize that today’s problems cannot be solved by the same thinking that created them.
Biomimicry invites us to step outside our own human exceptionalism and realize that some of the best ideas on earth might not be ours. That relative to the nearly 4 billion years that life has been on earth, humans are just a blink of an eye on that time frame and yet within that time we have pushed our species to the brink of extinction.
Biomimicry teaches us to see nature not as something to take from but something that can teach us. It’s about learning from spider silk to make materials at body-temperature and pressure, using only the energy of the sun. It’s about copying forms to make more efficient designs. It’s about learning from the deep principles in nature for how to thrive over the long haul.
What biomimicry does is gives us a model to follow and a measure to base ourselves. It teaches us that we are not necessarily a bad species but just a very young one. And most importantly, biomimicry gives us hope.
With the rise of ecoanxiety that is associated with incredible habitat loss, heightened climate uncertainty, and a relatively dim prospect for our future, biomimicry teaches us that there is a mentor to help us out of this mess. It just requires a bold way of thinking – one that might challenge the status quo.
Think naturally
Knowing the importance of light in healthcare facilities, imagine we designed perforated floorplates that allowed natural light to trickle through each level like the diffused light in a forest canopy? What if we designed solar shafts that copied polar bears, whose skin is black and hair translucent to funnel the sun’s energy right to the skin? Imagine using fiber optic cables to bring natural light past beds or even into furniture to light up a room or allow patients to feel the cloud cover roll over the sun?
What if we learned from sunflowers and the Fibonacci sequence to maximize “packaging” of rooms or beds? What if we learned from the branching patterns of lungs, rivers, veins, and neurons to build facilities that were more effective at moving flows, maximizing ventilation and enhancing the transport of nutrients?
What if we designed buildings like skin, where the exterior was semi-autonomous and sensitive to its environment, allowing different aspects of the building respond to its local microclimate? Imagine walls that could shed, sweat, grow insulation, expand, or contract to maximize efficiency. Imagine if, like a forest, each healthcare facility could share information and resources with other buildings, even competing practices, for the greater resilience of the community.
A call for collaboration
At B+H, we’ve looked to elephant skin for designing a passive cooling façade in India and mangroves to inspire tower foundations in the deltas of Vietnam. We looked to forests to build Canada’s first circular food economy by recognizing that there are no “wastes” in nature. We’ve studied ecological resilience as a foundation for urban resilience. And yet we feel like we are only starting to scratch the surface.
We have not mastered design. And we have not mastered healthcare design. Designing in today’s climate is not an easy journey. But what we do know is that biomimicry only works well when diverse backgrounds come together to creatively disrupt the status quo approaches to design – when we let go of the preconceptions and the paradigms that got us here and courageously draw on the metaphors of nature to reimagine design. It’s when we learn to think naturally and create naturally in a way that draws on the genius of collaboration and the genius of the commons.
Much like a forest of trees, we need to engage in “coopetition” whereby we challenge each other to push innovation through competition while sharing resources, ideas, and information in a way that benefits the greater good of our group of companies and more importantly, our species. A forest naturally strives for diversity and in that diversity thrives.
Through biomimicry we have the models to follow. Through the emergence of incredible technologies and new materials, we have the tools to build with. And through the creativity of all of us, we have the inspiration to make it all real.
It’s a bright future ahead.
