How to teach your mom biomimicry and life’s principles

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For week four in biomimetic design, I was asked to choose an audience to teach biomimicry’s Life’s Principles to. I often have the hardest time explaining even my day job to my mom (I’m an associate design director for an advertising agency, and not a professional crafter). So what better practice of explaining a portion of sustainable design than teaching my mom about biomimetic design. The following is a script you can use to teach your mom too (if you ever need). 

Mom: What is biomimetic design and what are you learning?

Me: 

I’m glad you asked. Long story short, biomimetic design is the study of how the biosphere, or living organisms in nature operate. By studying the living side of nature, we humans can redesign things like products and services in a way that is safe for all life and can help sustain the Earth’s resources. Biomimetic design also helps us realign ourselves with nature. After all, we are organisms too. And we can realign with nature by following Life’s Principles.

There is a Biomimicry Institute that has helped distill all of this into a list of Life’s Principles (sometimes called Nature’s Principles). These are the loose guidelines that all nature’s organisms follow in order to survive and live in balance with their surroundings. I’ve found this list to be super helpful. 

[Show Life’s Principles butterfly chart.]

This butterfly is a helpful chart that breaks down these principles into two sections, with smaller categories within each wing. It is designed this way because without both wings, a butterfly can’t fly. There are other versions of the list out there, but this one for me at least, seems to be the easiest to understand.

Designers can use this chart to refer back to to ensure their design solutions follow suit. 

So here we have the butterfly, divided into “life creates conditions conducive to life” on the right, and “life adapts and evolves” on the left. The right side main principle essentially means we as humans should design with future generations in mind. The left side main principle means change is necessary to survive. The term adapt can mean small and big things. Like how pupils contract when you look at the sun. Or how humans will need to switch to different kinds of clean energy that doesn’t use fossil fuels. 

Each side of the wing includes three inner principles that branch out into additional principles under each. I’ll explain more with how I use it.

When I brainstorm, I can look at this chart and ask what principles does my solution achieve? What other principles might it lack? For example, say I want to design a new golf ball because the standard golf ball doesn’t degrade if it ends up in the pond of a golf course. I might look at how nature solves this. Nature uses benign manufacturing by using life friendly materials. This means it can be integrated back into nature. So now I might think about a biodegradable ball design using life-friendly or non-toxic materials.

[Show Life’s Principles checklist]

I mentioned there are multiple ways to go about organizing these principles. Here is a checklist version of the same list of principles, but broken down into questions. So if we think about the golf ball redesign, we can go through this checklist to see what the current ball design is doing right, and what could be improved. I think the standard golf ball design “integrates cyclic processes” because it is designed for reuse, but also lacks in the same category because it cannot be recycled and is not designed to integrate back to nature. So material selection is a top priority in the redesign. 

Let’s test it together. What other product should we put through the lens of Life’s Principles?