«Biomimicry is the conscious emulation of life’s genius. Innovation inspired by nature» – Janine M. Benuys, “Biomimicry“, 1997

Biomimicry is an approach to innovation that seeks sustainable solutions to human challenges by emulating nature’s time-tested patterns and strategies. The goal is to create products, processes, and policies—new ways of living—that are well-adapted to life on earth over the long haul. The core idea is that nature has already solved many of the problems we are grappling with. Animals, plants, and microbes are the consummate engineers. After billions of years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what surrounds us is the secret to survival. [from AskNature.org web site]

AskNature is the world’s most comprehensive catalog of nature’s solutions to human design challenges. This curated online library features free information on more than 1,800 (and growing!) natural phenomena and hundreds of bio-inspired applications. Think of AskNature as your home habitat. Whether you’re a designer, architect, engineer, or chemist looking for life-friendly solutions to a design challenge or a biologist who wants to share what you know about an amazing organism, AskNature is where biology and design cross-pollinate, so bio-inspired breakthroughs can be born. AskNature helps innovators understand how nature’s adaptations work, empowering them to mimic ideas that have evolved to thrive in balance with Earth’s complex systems.

Using the Biomimicry Taxonomy, it aligns natural inspiration with human challenges. A taxonomy is a system of classification. The Biomimicry Taxonomy is a classification system developed by the Biomimicry Institute to organize biological content on the website AskNature. The taxonomy categorizes the different ways that organisms and natural systems meet functional challenges.The Biomimicry Taxonomy organizes biology by function. In AskNature, the ways that organisms and systems have adapted in response to challenges are called strategies. Put another way, a strategy is how an organism does something and a function is why it does it. The Biomimicry Taxonomy is useful not just because it will help you navigate better on AskNature, but because it provides a framework that may help you understand your challenge differently.

AskNature is built by and for the community. It is an initiative of the Biomimicry Institute, whose goal is to make the act of asking nature’s advice a normal part of everyday inventing. Isn’t AskNature simply one of the best web site in the world ?!? 🙂

• Biomimicry
• Design
• Innovation
• Science
• Sustainability
• Technology