Biomimetics, it transpires at a pre-Christmas party, is the next big thing. Nature, the great exemplar of design efficiency, has evolved design efficiencies which we must follow to produce high performing products.
Biomimetics involves taking a natural structure and replicating it in artificial materials to make a commercial product.
The apocryphal biomimetics story is the invention of Velcro. When Georges de Mestral saw his dog come back from walks covered in burrs, he investigated the structure of burrs and their effect on the dog’s hairs, and decided that the array of hooks on the burrs and the mass of fibres on the dog, if replicated in a synthetic material, could make a strong clothes fastener.
The underpinning to biomimetics theory is that Nature provides the best examples of design because natural designs have stood the test of evolution and time and are refined to the point of ultimate minimalism to achieve the highest performance.
The University of Bath is big in biomimetics with a professor specializing in the subject, Professor Julian Vincent.
In the electronics sphere, the best example of biomimetics is neural networks, where people have tried to simulate the structure of the brain with chips containing cells which have multiple connections to other cells.
If nature’s design is so good, why haven’t neural nets caught on after some 30 years of continual development?
Some years back there was a Hitachi computer based on neural nets which claimed to be able to forecast the stock market. The fact that there’s not in every sitting room suggests its forecast weren’t very good.
Maybe the chip industry has not yet mastered the art of biomimicry.
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