Name: Brainstorm Design 2024: Biomimicry in Architecture and Engineering
Uploaded: 2024-12-05
Duration: 15 min 34 s
Description: Jamie Miller, Director of Biomimicry, SJ Group, In conversation with Nicholas Gordon, Fortune

Jamie Miller, Director of Biomimicry, SJ Group, In conversation with Nicholas Gordon, Fortune

Brainstorm Design 2024: Biomimicry in Architecture and Engineering

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All right. So maybe let's start with, you know, obvious straightforward questions. What's the best way to understand what biomimicry is? Biomimicry is Velcro in the 19 forties, the Swiss engineer got fed up with birds sticking to his pants and his dog's hair and took his frustration into fascination to copy that hooking mechanism to make Velcro one of the most successful adhesives of our time. It's a wind turbine blade that copies a humpback whale fin and those bumps on the leading edge called tubac and applying that with applying it to a wind turbine blade, finding that that blade is 20% more efficient runs at slower wind speeds and it's quieter. So biomimicry is recognizing that nature has been designing for 3.8 billion years and in that time has figured out some really brilliant strategies to similar problems that we face. And then how are you using that those 3.8 billion years of, of design when it comes to architecture and buildings? The process of doing biomimicry quote unquote is, is to always start with what do you want your design to do instead of jumping into what you want to design take a moment and think, what is it that you're trying to achieve? And once you understand that function, you ask the natural world. So practical examples, we designed a building in India. We wanted it to be self cooling, we wanted to capture the monsoons and hold them. So our question was, how does nature self cool? We looked at termite mounds, we looked at elephant skin. Uh We looked at prairie dog holes and we learned from those metaphors, those strategies to make really simple uh design solutions. To give you a practical example of how it applied the elephant skin has this beautiful cracking kind of um facade. We'll call it uh I'll, I'll preface this by saying to you. I dropped out of biology. I hated biology. So I'm looking at it through an engineering lens. And what we realize is that those cracks, when an elephant blows water over its body, those cracks capture the moisture. And so it allows it to evaporative cool over a longer period of time. It's like a little protective area. So we designed this rock wall facade that's hooked up to the rain harvesting system, trickles water into the rocks and has that same kind of process that evaporative cools. It pulls the water off at a slow rate to passively cool the building. I mean, it's funny you mentioned that you dropped out of biology because in that case, like then how did you get started in this field in the first place. I mean, you like, how did you become an expert in this topic before then joining up with um SJ group? It, it started 20 years ago, I was uh an engineering student um in Canada, learning, learning engineering. And, and the whole time I had this feeling like there had to be a different way of doing things. I was being trained in a certain paradigm. So I took this elective called math and poetry. It was an hour and a half of math theorems and an hour and a half of poetry. It wasn't the synergy of the two. It was just, we studied math and then we studied poems. But in the math part, our professor was brilliant and at having us almost imagine like we're coming up with the theorems ourselves. And the one that stood out and kind of shifted my whole paradigm was the Fibonacci sequence. So it's a sequence of numbers that um when you play with them, you get the golden ratio and then you get that spiral. And that's where the professor got me. He once, once we saw this spiral, he said, where have you seen this before? And in that moment, I realized that spirals in the packaging of sunflower seeds, it's in the way that pine cones curl. It's in the way that you're, when you pull the plug in your bathtub, you get that vortex that spiral was ubiquitous in nature. And in that moment, I realized that nature could teach us about design. So up until that time, I had been learning to use math and science to engineer my environment. When in that moment, I learned that nature through math and science could teach us about how to design. Let's say 11 more definitions. Question, you know another one of the topics we're working on is regenerative design. It tell me more about kind of what, what you mean by that term when it comes to the built environment, I'll, I'll start by saying nature is naturally regenerative. So what I love about biomimicry and why it's so powerful is that these terms like circularity, regenerative design, passive design. Nature has already done it and biomimicry can inspire us to look at what can nature teach us to do next. And so regenerative design to me is, is really about recognizing that humans are natural. We're a natural species, our breast feeds trees, our bodies feed the soil. Why can't our buildings feed their ecosystem? So at some point in our history and our evolution as a species, we've diverted, we've diverged and that was what I really got excited about. My phd was wondering what made us so different. And so regenerative design is just coming back, adopting new paradigms, new principles so that we create systems that go way beyond doing less harm and are truly regenerative. So what does it actually mean when you're looking at a project, whether, you know, just a building or a larger area, what does it mean to, you know, to work with the natural world as opposed to against it or ignoring it? So this is a key part of our, our paradigms that we've, we've adopted is that in when we build the first phase of any design process starts in our imagination, it starts with our assumptions, our biases, how we think informs how we design. Some of the assumptions that you can see in our built environment is that we're separate from nature. We've designed incredible concrete systems that separate us from nature. We've also built on this paradigm that we can control or predict nature. Um And these aren't necessarily wrong. But what we've realized is that the more that we've grown, the more difficult it is to predict nature, the more expensive it is to fight nature. Nature wants to come in nature abhors gradients. And if I mean, the case study is, if we all left the city today, what would naturally happen is nature would take over. So the the thing about stopping to fight nature is learning from her principles, learning how to design in a way that allows nature to come in and allows us to kind of dance with nature, but let nature lead. Um So part of the reason why I think this, we're talking about this now is obviously there's climate change, climate change is made um sustainability environmental protection, a lot more present, I think in, in the minds of developers and designers. Um obviously, we're based here in Asia. A lot of our cities are threatened by climate change, extreme weather. I remember last year the really bad floods that happened in Hong Kong, like I've never seen floods that bad in Hong Kong ever. Um in my, in my 30 years of living there. Um So, you know, what would be your, your advice to developers and designers out here when it comes to biomimicry and regenerative design, you know, what should they be looking for? How should they be thinking about this problem? How should they be thinking about design in an age of climate change and extreme weather? Yeah, great question. We, we start all of our processes with something called the living story and, and what that means is we want to learn what the land wants to do, what it will support us in doing and what it will permit us to do and it gives us this unique lens to kind of like imagine what's the trajectory of that landscape? If we were not to touch it, if we weren't to do anything, what does Nature want to do and then to start to start to make design decisions based on that. So if nature wants to flood, the old paradigm or the engineering based resilience is try to fight that flood, but how big are berms going to be how much energy are we going to put into fighting it? There's a great project in Toronto where I'm from, where they designed in a wetland and designed all their buildings to flood. So it's a shift in the paradigm again where we're using ecological resilience and eco ecosystems don't fight environmental pressures. They kind of learn and adapt at, at, at multiple scales. So integrating new technology, digital um uh technology to learn what nature is doing to be more nuanced and then make adaptations in real time. Another example is like you think of your skin, my skin is responding differently here than it is here. So having that more locally attuned responsive design is a, is a key part of, of managing climate change, reintegrating uh natural phenomenon into our designs and doing it in a way that, you know, doesn't make us too uncomfortable and it's good. You mentioned the tech is like this isn't an anti tech thing at all. I mean, there's a lot of research that goes into new materials, new design processes, like what role are, you know, new technologies? And yes, here's the A I question, you know, what role is A I also playing in making these ideas more feasible. This is the brilliant thing about biomimicry is that it's a bridge, it's a bridge in so many ways. I work a lot with indigenous communities because it's providing me a bridge with some of their principles and thinking. But it's a bridge also uh in terms of historic technologies and future technologies. And what I mean by that is, you know, how do you harness when you do biomimicry, you come up with some pretty bold kind of metaphors. Like, what if this building could breathe like a lung or what if the skin of the building could breathe like skin when you have that metaphor? It's like, well, OK, how do you make that come to life? How do you do that? And that's when you start to look at the plethora of technologies that are available and see and you cherry pick the ones that help that metaphor come to life and, and become real. Um I do want to ask about, about your role, you know, you are the director of Biomimicry for SJ group, a big multinational construction and architecture firm. Why do you think a big firm like SJ group is investing time to make a director of biomimicry position? Um So in my journey, uh II I had a company and, and one of the, the, the companies within Sur Beard was my client and we built this relationship over time and really built out that biomimicry practice. But I think what SJ A did was they got on to that realization that like I said earlier, regenerative design, passive design circularity, all of those things already exist in nature. So, biomimicry is kind of this catch all and it's a way of looking at design and, and in a way, yeah, it's a way of looking at design that's like perpetually trying to copy and mimic nature. So I think they just saw a little bit ahead of their time because nature is also going to teach us what to do next. But the cool thing is is that um although I'm, I'm the first director, we are shortly followed by Microsoft who, how also has a director of biomimicry in the latest uh regenerative design report by Arup. It was co-written by a biomimicry expert. Uh We're seeing Perkins and will purchase a company that is very biomimetic. Um Jacobs Engineering has hired a bunch of biomimicry professionals. So the cool thing is is that we're seeing this uprising and this acknowledgement that nature is the only model of sustainability we have on this planet. We're a very young species. And so when you use biomimicry, you kind of put ourselves in our place and we can see that it can lead us for a long time. Um You know, I I I've seen some of the, some of the designs that you're putting out there that your team is putting out there. I think I saw the, was it the Hiway idea? It's like these Hexagons that are surrounding a bridge and it's a cool looking idea. One wonders if you talk to the construction, the guys, they'll be like, oh, sorry, boss like this. This is not, I mean, it's a cool idea but it's not going to work. I mean, how, I mean, do you ever have to feel like you have to compromise between, you know, there's this cool idea based off of natural ideas and then you try to work on it with the materials and the process that we have and it's not possible, like, do you ever have to compromise between those two things? Yeah. I mean, I guess there is compromise. The point of biomimicry is to push the paradigm. So you're going to come up with bold ideas. But the point of that is to develop, it's a development of believable ideas that might not yet be possible but, but provoke a conversation, what could be possible. But really, we don't try to compromise because I, I've seen in my time that the only limitation to, to the application of biomimicry is creativity, it's the creativity and how you abstract metaphors from nature, but also the creativity and how you can exploit or harness or use existing technologies to put, put that bold idea to life. And so, um no, I always think there's a solution. It's just a matter of finding it. And are there like smaller things that can be done with, with building projects? So not maybe like a a radical change but small tweaks that can be made to really kind of, you know, to make our buildings more efficient, better cooling, whatever you want them to do Yeah, there's, there's thousands of biomimicry technologies out there. I've been tracking them for 20 years. Um, you know, cool windows that copy, um, uh, spider silk that reduces bird collisions by 70%. You know, there's, um, uh, IOT technology that kind of matches all of your electrical systems and helps them communicate similar to bee, uh, bee hives and how bees communicate. So there's technologies you can use. Um, but, you know, if you want your, your building to circulate better, look at, you know, natural models, it's, it's there are so many ways you can apply biomimicry to an existing uh building or project. Um So I know you've had to work with kind of many, many designers over the world, kind of telling them how biomimicry works. But you know what's kind of the one piece of advice or the one way of thinking about this issue that you'd give to an up and coming designer that wants to start looking into the space, applying some of these natural techniques in the design work they're doing. So there's two things I'll say. First of all, biomimicry is very simple. Um Maybe I'll start with this. It's just, it's essentially a lens that when you adopt this lens, your whole world will change. So I'm going to invite you to just close your eyes for a second or just imagine a forest in your brain. That forest has ancient elders that have long lasted climate change. Towers that are moving fluids up hundreds of feet without electricity, collecting solar energy. With these materials that use a subset of periodic table of elements. Water based chemistry, these leaves are built in benign manufacturing. They fall into a circular economy. Those trees are communicating with each other through underground networks and tunnels through their mycelium. When you start to see that nature is doing chemistry, engineering design, you start to realize that there's a whole world out there. And to practically do biomimicry, there's two things I'll say one is to go back to that function. Whenever you have a design challenge, just ask, how would nature do that function? And then the second part is I like to break biomimicry up into form based biomimicry, which is copying shapes in nature to achieve a function process based biomimicry is manufacturing or behaving that's like the termite mound example. Um And then systems based biomimicry, which is where I love to play. And that's when you start to learn the subtleties of, of nature. And you start to learn the brushstrokes. It's like imagining the natural world this beautiful piece of art. And we've been asked to add to it. And over hundreds of years, we've been scribbling on that piece of art. But if we learn those brushstrokes, we can add to it, we can learn the nuances of the artist and build to the beauty. All right. So with that contemplated image, um I'd like to kind of. Thank you so much, Jamie for kind of introducing us this idea and all the cool techniques, materials technologies that are coming out from looking at the natural world. So everyone, please. Thank Jamie. Thank you very much.