Be, Contemplate, Imagine

Biomimetic Design • Week 10

It is mid-morning, Saturday, April 1, 2023. Though I should mention it feels as if it should be January 91, 2023 as we’ve just received another 6 inches of snow in the overnight blizzard. Now at 10:30AM, the streets are bright white and trees are glittering with their fresh coat of powder. My chosen sit spot is the window area of Cafe Ceres in the Armatage neighborhood in South Minneapolis, Minnesota. It is 28°F outside, bright, sunny and still. Throughout the neighborhood, neighbors are hard at work moving snow by shovel and snowblower. It’s another lovely day to contemplate my chosen design challenge and further laps around the Biomimicry spiral. 

My chosen design challenge is to redesign a standard golf club shaft. Standard golf club shafts are manufactured with raw precious metals. In the final steps of the first lap around the biomimicry spiral, I focused on providing solutions for how to maintain the shaft’s structure when met with stress and impact. By altering the structure of the shaft design, it may be possible to design a shaft using non metal materials, much less metal, or bring back certain, more easily recycled materials like aluminum. I believe there is much opportunity for improvement within conventional golf club shaft design and golf club design at large. My initial lap just scratched the surface.

As I evaluated my first lap design against life’s principles, I was reminded that the interconnectedness of parts of a golf club (head, grip, adhesive to hold parts together, etc.) may be a key area to dive into. Perhaps even more interesting are potential solutions within the greater golf equipment manufacturing system. For example, I find myself questioning why golf equipment manufacturing companies look to raw materials when there is potentially abundant local recycled materials. How might nature self-assemble to hold groups (companies) accountable (to use more sustainable materials in their products)? 

During my BCI session, I noticed multiple groups of people coming together to aid individuals with cars stuck in the snow (afterall, humans are part of the biosphere). There are no hard rules that state Minnesotans must rush to help a person in need during snow emergencies, but we do it anyway. Perhaps the decentralized nature of self-assembly is also something to consider.

I leave my session with buzzing thoughts and caffeine help jump start the spiral process once more.