prevent fracture
lesson plan
kingfisher
sense movement
water conservation
leaves
efficient routing
biomimicry videos
produce color
training
healthy soil
protect from floods
Life on earth presents elegant solutions to many of the challenges that designers and innovators face every day. Explore AskNature to find biological strategies, inspired ideas, and resources relative to your own innovation challenges, so you can begin to emulate the time-tested forms, processes, and systems that already thrive in balance with Earth’s complex systems.
Biological Strategies
Nature’s refined solutions, mapped to your design challenges.
Inspired Ideas
Design solutions to human challenges, inspired by biological strategies.
Resources
Everything you need to learn and teach about biomimicry and life centered design.
Collections
Themed clusters of strategies, ideas, and resources, curated by you.
Think you have what it takes?
AskNature is making it easier for people to share and organize biological literature so that it can be used to inspire innovators around the world. You can help by training a new algorithm to identify functions and organisms in short blocks of text.
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How might we …
Here are a few Biological Strategies to get you started …
Mound facilitates gas exchangemound-building termites
The internal structure of above-ground macrotermite mounds facilitates gas exchange in the below-ground nest by harnessing external wind energy
Plant species diversity creates long-term stabilityprairie grasslands
Diverse plant species in prairie grasslands support a long-term, stable ecosystem because they exhibit complementary functionality.
Leaves capture waterbromeliads
The leaves of some bromeliads capture water and nutrients in a storage tank via hydrophobic leaf surfaces.
From permaculture to Velcro® to winglets, humans have been looking to nature for inspiration for as long as we’ve been inventing. Inspired Ideas catalog the stories behind realized and conceptual product, service, and system components that have their roots in biology …
Sharklet surface textureSharklet Technologies, LLC
Shark-inspired surface reduces bacterial growth without causing resistance
The Land Institute permacultureThe Land Institute
Perennial grain cropping mimics natural ecosystem behavior.
Concentrated solar plantMassachusetts Institute of Technology
Optimal arrangement of solar array mirrors based on Fibonacci spirals.
Interest in biomimicry has skyrocketed over the past decade, and there are now thousands of Resources—including books, articles, videos, lesson plans, groups, training programs, and more—available to folks who want to learn, teach, and practice this valuable problem solving approach. Get started with a few of our favorites here …
Sharing Biomimicry with Young PeopleBiomimicry Institute
An orientation to biomimicry for K-12 teachers and others who work with youth.
Zygote Quarterly
A quarterly journal for biologically inspired design.
Biomimicry Basics: How to Innovate Using Nature’s StrategiesDenise DeLuca
In this 4-hour online course you will learn a step by step method for turning nature's strategies into innovative design solutions using the biomimicry design spiral.
Collections tie together Biological Strategies, Inspired Ideas, and Resources into themes that are often correlated with a particular human challenge, geographic area, or set of environmental conditions. Check out a few of our favorites and then start your own …
Resilient Food Systems
Biological strategies could provide inspiration for how to improve our food systems at both minute and systemic scales.
Chemistry of Nature
How can we learn from nature to create materials without using life-threatening chemicals and high temperatures?
Cooling Down In The Heat
From sweating, to panting, to pulling water from air, living systems rely on a number of forms and processes to stay cool and hydrated.
“Nature is constantly innovating, endlessly experimenting and ever reinventing itself in the face of new challenges.
From materials and products to business models, biomimicry offers a fresh lens for all the dreamers and doers remaking the man-made world.”
Angela Nahikian, Steelcase
