Why can’t we have high-rises in our cities that are built out of wood?

Biomimicry connects us to a library of time-tested ideas that will teach us how to thrive on this planet. The best way to engage with this textbook? Start by adopting a biomimetic mindset. A biomimetic mindset can transform all aspects of your life as it transforms the way you view the world.

At Biomimicry Frontiers, we believe that in order to successfully perform biomimicry, we have to begin by understanding how we solve problems (or what we call inner biomimicry). This requires looking critically at our assumptions, our beliefs, our biases and our paradigms for they are at the root of how we behave, how we innovate and how we can create. We have inherited a set of systems that are born out of ideas from the past - including outdated ideas about our relationship with nature. How can we begin to rectify these?

2020 tested our resilience, urging us to rethink the way we live, work, create and behave. It has also shown how quickly we can change our behaviour if we really want to. As we step into the new year of 2021, we inevitably have a lot of hopes and expectations. But we may also be questioning our responsibility of designing our world for both ourselves and future generations.

Let us reflect on the City. The urban lifestyle has framed our development and conceived new waves of creativity, culture, and community

With only eight days left until the end of the year, many of us are thinking ahead. Examining the best way forward as we reflect on the challenges we face both in our personal lives and collectively as a society and how our current problems lack precedents for how to solve them. And we know that if we keep pulling from old ways of thinking that we won’t solve the root problem. So, how can we begin to address these wicked problems with new creativity? We need fresh thinking, new ideas, and different ways of seeing.

In 2020, the world shifted. Now we have an opportunity to design the trajectory of where we go from here.

An online course for creators who want to make things more sustainably.

A biomimicry Master Plan for residential development in Vietnam has won an award for best Urban Design (Concept). Rethinking the Future has recently handed out the 2018 awards, which included a first place to the design proposal by B+H Architects and Biomimicry Frontiers. Our design integrated biomimicry principles into the development of a 200 hectare piece of land that existed on a river delta, in the Nhon Trach Province of Vietnam.

Circular economies are not new. My grandpa was an expert in them. But we can also learn from a forest how to be more skillful and strategic in building circularity and creating non-linear systems.