seeds of wonder

UNEP names Janine Benyus as 2009 Champion of the Earth for Science and Innovation

I'm just pulling together a presentation for a key EU meet in Brussels on Quest, an Arts Council project that aims to nurture the development of an innovation skills mindset in UK and Polish manufacturers - by pairing Designer-makers and manufacturers to work together on defined projects - Quests. 

A key feature of Quest is sustainability and we'll be running workshops on sustainable innovation as well as developing sustainable innovation tool-kits. As part of this we're aiming to introduce biomimicry into the workshops as a source of inspiration and ideas on solving challenges faced by the manufacturers and designer-makers

So I was delighted to see this email (below) from the Biomimicry Institute land in my inbox.UNEP names Janine Benyus as 2009 Champion of the Earth for Science and Innovation Brilliant news and very deserved. Great for the Biomimicry Institute too and the growth of awareness of Biomimicry.

For those who've yet to see Janine's TED talk, '12 Sustainable Design Ideas from Nature' do have a watch. Robert Full's talks are also as fascinating.

The Ask Nature website, recently launched is a brilliant way to explore how nature's design's might contain answers to common design problems encountered by industry.

Janine Benyus is in Paris attending this year's B4E - Business for the Environment, the UN Global Summi - a potent mix of leading environmental thinkers, innovators, global business leaders and key public figures. It will be interesting to see what new thinking the current economic climate will stimulate in sustainable innovation. Aron Cramer from Business for Social Responsibility is attending and blogging some useful stuff. 

Dear Supporter,

Breaking news!         

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) announced the 2009 laureates of the UNEP Champions of the Earth Awards in a special ceremony in Paris today.  We are so proud that Janine Benyus, Chair of the Board of The Biomimicry Institute, was named the 2009 Champion of the Earth for Science and Innovation.

Past Champions of the Earth winners include Al Gore, former vice president of the United States, H.E. Mikhail Gorbachev of the Russian Federation and H.E. President Thabo Mbeki and the people of South Africa.

Thank you for your support of The Biomimicry Institute.

Happy Earth Day! 

Bryony Schwan

Executive Director

The Biomimicry Institute

bryony@biomimicryinstitute.org

Disruptive Innovation & Disrupting Class

My postman delivered my latest Amazon fix with a knowing look yesterday. 

Disrupting Class: How Disruptive Innovation will change the Way the World Learns by Clayton Christensen.

It's received good reviews and by some interesting people - Howard Gardner, Vicki Phillips (Gates Foundation) and I actually came to it via The Big Picture schools brochure, who he seems to heartily endorse.

I'm always interested, if not a little wary, on what business thinkers have to say on education, sometimes finding that their recommendations come from what shape they feel (current & future) business requires children to be in for greater competitive commercial success, mini malleable adults. So I'm interested to see what the gravitational core of the book will be, flicking through I notice a chapter on  'Schools meet society's needs' and on the jacket it reads "We can compete in the global classroom - and get ahead in the global market" this may just be publishers huff though.

When I first started home-educating a few years ago, and started thinking about the purpose of education I decided that it's aims were simple; to nurture happy, balanced self-oriented children who were able to find their place in the world - not society, culture, prevailing politics or 'work' as we see them now. I would say that this is probably quite important in the context of today's times, to be careful that we're not inadvertently carving out a role for this generation of children to fix the problems of the generation before.

This crosses over with Rudolph Steiner's philosophies, described well in this exert from Mothering Magazine;

Steiner felt that children need a balanced development of their capacities in order to be prepared as adults to contribute to cultural renewal, instead of to the ongoing dehumanization of society. His aim was not to inculcate in children any particular viewpoint or ideology, but to make them so healthy, strong, and inwardly free that they would become a kind of tonic for society as a whole. The purpose of education, he thought, should not be merely to instill knowledge, which can be coldly abstract and destructive when separated from human values and a feeling for the humanity of other people. Rather, Steiner’s goal was to educate the whole human being so that thinking, feeling, and doing are integrated, and capable of functioning in a healthy way. Such people are more likely to discover and implement solutions that further human development, rather than fall prey to narrow and dogmatic doctrines such as National Socialism. In fact, when they came to power, the Nazis closed all Waldorf schools in Germany and, later, in the countries they occupied.

The universality and forward-looking thrust of Waldorf education was summarized by Steiner: “We shouldn’t ask: what does a person need to know or be able to do in order to fit into the existing social order? Instead we should ask: what lives in each human being and what can be developed in him or her? Only then will it be possible to direct the new qualities of each emerging generation into society. The society will become what young people, as whole human beings, make out of the existing social conditions. The new generation should not just be made to be what the present society wants it to become.”

More flicking shows though that there is though lots of good stuff in Disrupting Class on 'personalization' (that term doesn't sit so well with me) and the importance child-centric education, as these ideas are not especially new it will be interesting to see how applying the theory of disruptive innovation will help to fully integrate learner-centric thinking into education. Looking forward to a good read.

Pretty Rubbish?

Playing at their favourite tree-swing, as a diversion, my son and his friend decided to do a bit of archeology on the launch slope. they were pretty chuffed to unearth a pair of 'old' (apologies archeologists at the random arm-waving on the age) bristle and bone toothbrushes, as well as a couple of other bits and bobs. Our suspicion was that the mound was the result of an old Victorian tip from the nearby woodman's cottages.

The toothbrushes were quite simply crafted, the bristles having since rotted away (how long would our so-called disposable toothbrushes take to break down now?), and gone to provide nutrients to the soil as would the bone when it followed later.

As I turned them over in my hands I couldn't help but wonder if our rubbish would be just as interesting to look at and just as nutritious to the ground - McDonalds super-size cartons, Pret Sandwich boxes, Walkers crisps, Coca-Cola cans, Greggs Bakers bags, KFC, Subway. I mention these as these are the brands that have the biggest share of voice on the streets - quite literally - with Mcdonalds packaging making up 29% of litter on the streets and in the countryside according to a survey with Keep Britain Tidy. Research released at the same time by Manchester business school suggests that litter leaves a damaging legacy on a brand's reputation. What do the organisations think - some such as McDonalds seem to make a certain degree of effort - though nothing especially ground-breaking, others such as Red Bull seem to be dissonant at best. When contacted by Tim Barnes from Litter Heroes, who identifies them as one of the worst offenders in his part of the country, RedBull released a statement effectively saying not our responsibility, it's up to the customers to get rid of it properly.

Disappointing, short-sighted and some-what behind the times with many organisations nowadays recognizing to some degree or other their role in ecosystems of community and environment. But beside the truculent nature of the response a few things strike me about the litter debate.

1) There's no doubt there's a huge littering problem. Debate is stuck between 2 absolutes, throwing away (good?) or littering and an argument over where responsibility lies. There's also no doubt that many of our measures are not working - law and logos alike as -Bill Bryson noted on the Litter Heroes website 

 "Now here is a fact to make you sit up. In the three years to last November, the city of Sheffield recorded a rather whopping (but by no means exceptional) 441,361 instances of fly-tipping. In the same period, it managed to catch and prosecute exactly one person" 

2) A less linear and more systems based approach could be taken. With the Keep Britain Tidy logo approaching mid-life perhaps some time for some fresh thinking.

3) Nature litters. All the time, especially in Autumn. Like the thinking in Cradle-to-Cradle and Gunter Pauli's Systems Thinking, could the very nature of litter be transformed. Like blossoms on a tree could it be pretty. Or perhaps biomimicry could be called upon, with inspiration from nature's habit of timed-degradation to ensure it breaks down within a pre-determined time - either as fleeting as butterfly wings for products with a short life span, or to work under tougher, more elemental conditions and last longer taking a note from creatures such as mussels and mussel glue, all then returning into the system as a nutrient. 

4) Perhaps litter could be edible and we could eat it, or feed it to the ducks. We could mimic the spiral structure of the womb to expand and collapse and make it easier to carry and perhaps encourage the right behaviours when out and about. 

5) These supported by other measures such as well positioned bins in hot spot areas sponsored by the companies in question. Rural litter seems to be mostly linked to motorists, as we know by nose-picking, singing aloud and road rage, we all take on a different personality inside our cars. Understanding the nature of the problem, or jobs that motorists are trying to get done, would help drive more solutions for temporarily storing used packaging in cars.

The science is there, there's been much innovation on sustainable packaging and big consortium packaging organisations such as Faraday have been exploring biomimicry and packaging for some time.

It might seem an awful lot of trouble for a minority problem. But actually it's linked to the bigger picture. If this litter is the visible minority, lets say 3%, what about the invisible majority, the other 97%, that we've comfortably thrown away - landfill or recycled - pulped or burned.

If all those Mcd cups, Greggs bags and Pret boxes are recycled into other materials, paper etc. We may feel somewhat better about it? But much of the recycling system is a bolt-on trying to deal with an imperfect input. If it's incinerated for so-called recovered energy, 57 chemical by-products are released. If it's pulped for paper there's still stuff left over, a sludge, in fact according the the environment agency, in UK alone 300,000 tonnes of the stuff - and I guess that must be the dried weight as its converted into an ash - a mixture of bleaches, chemicals, inks and short paper fibres. This has to go somewhere and a lot of it goes back to landfill - I'm not sure the alternatives and plans to divert a third of this into other uses are anymore palatable. In true brush it under the carpet-style it's hidden in our homes and food - building industry - making bricks, cement and other building products - and farming - agricultural liming - a process which influences the pH of the soil - in other words spread on the fields by being legally sold as a soil conditioner! Carrots anyone? See Toxic Sludge is Good for You for further reading on the pr industry.

I guess you could say this re-packaging is systems thinking to a degree, but it only works when dealing with honest inputs and outputs and the resulting products - such as litter - can be both designed and treated as a valuable benefit to all, a truly closed loop network, not by appearances alone.

Organisations like McDonalds and RedBull need to recognise both their inputs and outputs in the bigger picture, the whole linked network with proper published auditing. Would they want to proudly proclaim that their bags of carrots are grown with the aid of chemical paper-mill sludge from their cups?

Not that I want to bash them over the heads with a green club, I'd like to see the whole thinking-turned on its head - as Gunter Pauli's Systems Thinking does, to view every output as a valuable commodity, doing away with the concept of waste, if designed with the right frameworks from the start.

Michigan State University School of Packaging has recently won $400,000 from Coca-Cola to create a packaging innovation sustainability centre - to measure the environmental impact of packaging. Let's hope some good stuff, rather than corporate wool, comes out of there.

A big part of the answer lies in school education - not education on the environmental issues - the symptoms - but on the causes, linear silo thinking. The thinking that separates, biology from home-economics, chemistry from philosophy, business from art and so on. To encourage systems thinking in the workplace we need to sow the right seeds at school. Perhaps then we will design litter as we'd like to see it outside our front-door and that might in turn ensure it's what we'd like to know of it when it's under the floor and on our food.

Going with the flow

Related to the shark blog and the question of flow ... Jay Harman re-designed the fan based on biomimicry - analysing flow forms in nature - to produce greater energy efficiencies. It's a huge market worth more than Hollywood, as exhaust fans are a feature in many bits of kit. 

His company PAX Scientific " is an engineering research and design firm that uses streamlining geometries to design energy, efficient, quiet, and ecologically friendly technology." Definitely an organisation to watch.  More on Jay in another blog and also related to that an exploration of the narrowness of our curriculum and increasingly our home lives too. A line in his bio says "Harman's love of nature began as a boy swimming in the ocean near his home". Experience and wonderment rooted in the natural world help us observe, learn and to ask the right questions, how do our home and school lives enable this experience?

Scott E.Page - The Difference

This book looks great, it's been added to my extensive Amazon Wishlist. 

From the reviews it sounds like it makes a good case for diversity in education and the workplace in order to reach better everythings; practices, solutions, innovations etc.

Much of the breakthroughs for medicine, the environment, business practice and education simply won't happen without a diverse collaborative approach. Education is still largely stuck on educating from the neck up and even then just using selected parts of the brain. Looks like another good case for nurturing creativity in schools. Perhaps a complement to Howard Gardner's Five Minds work too?? I'm also reading Ken Robinson's latest book - The Element - which looks at how to create an environment in schools and the workplace around how we nurture all the diverse talents we have rather than a select few.

"Review
Rather than ponder moral questions like, 'Why can't we all get along?' Dr. Page asks practical ones like, 'How can we all be more productive together?' The answer, he suggests, is in messy, creative organizations and environments with individuals from vastly different backgrounds and life experiences. -- Claudia Dreifus New York Times The Difference is brimming with so many intriguing insights and findings that I cannot do justice to them all. -- Philip E. Tetlock Science A fascinating and important book... The Difference is a thought-provoking and stimulating read. -- Diane Coyle Business Economist [Page] redefines the way we understand ourselves in relation to one another. The Difference is about how we think in groups...and how our collective wisdom exceeds the sum of its parts. Why can teams of people find better solutions than brilliant individuals working alone? And why are the best group decisions and predictions those that draw upon the very qualities that make each of us unique? The answers lie in diversity...not what we look like outside, but what we look like within, our distinct tools and abilities. Education Digest In The Difference, Page reveals how groups that display a range of perspectives outperform groups of like-minded experts. Diversity yields superior outcomes, and he proves it using his own cutting-edge research. Moving beyond the politics that often clouds standard debates about diversity, Page explains why difference beats out homogeneity. And he examines practical ways to apply diversity's logic to a host of problems. Here is the City Page has written a book that offers a pragmatic defense of diversity practices, where having a diverse set of points of view in a group equates to better decision making. The book ...illustrates the benefits of a different way of thinking about problem solving, providing people with conceptual tools to understand what lies behind some of the more popular treatments of topics and to reshape the public debate about the benefits and disadvantages of diversity. -- Henry Farrell Quality World "

How do we leave the door open for what we don't yet know

I love watching TED, it's interesting how often you come across something that links with an idea that was forming in your mind, or with other things you happen to be reading. Speaking of which it's TED 2009 this week. I'd love to be there.

Picking up the trail on other people's work on vibration, fascinates me. Luca Turin's talk on 'the science of scent' sparks a number of thoughts. Luca explored how we actually register smell? 

This is still a controversial area with a handful of competing theories. The shape model has it that it is to do with molecular shape - the lock and key mechanism. Luca's work, inspired work of Wright and Dyson, however set out to demonstrate that smell worked by vibration and not shape. That each molecule, and the bonds connecting them, responsible for a smell - such as cut grass - vibrated at it's own unique frequency. (And that frequency can be translated into audible range as a note). This was interesting enough in itself as I've always thought that colours sing - that would be one of my ways of describing them, each with a different tune. Smells are often described as having a note. This is not to say that shape isn't important in smell but Luca's theory is that smell is not a consequence of shape alone or even primarily.

Luca was able to demonstrate his theory when he left academia and set up a company "putting someone else's money where my mouth was" to work for industry developing fragrance and flavours. A French perfumer set him the challenge of finding a compound that smelt like coumarin. Coumarin is a sweet hay-like, tobacco smell, very important and popular in perfume (and so financially valuable) but actual coumarin is toxic and can't be used as I guess eroding your customer-base over time is not much good for business. Undaunted, they profiled coumarin -that is analysed its vibrational spectrum- and set about finding a match. They found one after just three weeks - virtually unknown. Quite a different shape, but an almost perfect match on vibrational frequency and the same sweet tobacco scent.

" When you're a scientist you're always selling ideas, people are very resistant to ideas .. when you put a 10 gm vial on the table and it smells like coumarin and it isn't coumarin, and you found it in three weeks, this focuses everybody's minds wonderfully."

A great story and well worth a watch.

Watching it leaves me with several thoughts;

1) Connected to the vibrational theory - how does this connect to or intersect the work of other researchers or traditions, on vibrational theory such as Candace Pert, Helen Langevin,Traditional Chinese Medicine, which in turn has interesting connections with the Patricia Kane's biomedical work, this touches on our understanding of our communication systems - what are the opportunities for medicine, industry and biomimicry.

2) This is more about mindset and the process of creativity and innovation itself. When I studied science the shape theory was presented as an accepted and complete'ish picture. In both education and innovation how do we leave the door open for what we don't yet know in order for us to think more creatively about solutions and the way stuff works. Generally we like black and white pictures rather than probables, but the trouble is this does tend to fix our way of seeing, to keep on thinking the world is flat. Prescription education based on standardised testing can only reinforce prescriptive standard thinking and carry the culture over to the workplace.

3) Linked to this is the importance of language and metaphor in building pictures in keeping the door open. When we use metaphors - and still pictures of lock and key it starts to fix in our minds how we think stuff is working. When we describe the immune system as defence, we start to interpret its behaviour within that context, as well as then compartmentalise function. Much of our language in medicine and business is often war-like and compartmentalised, rather than collaborative and networked - though much of this is changing now with our digital landscape as we recognise the power of networks and collaboration in both science and business.

These are huge subjects in themselves, but I'd quite like to think aloud on them some other posts. Luca Turin is also involved in an interesting DARPA research project on scent detection, more on that later too.

Sharks good for the economy

More gloomy news each week on the state of the UK economy and fate of manufacturing – as SME's 'shed jobs at the fastest rate since the early 1990s'. One of the few sectors showing growth both here in the UK and the US is the Green sector. A recent survey by the NVCA in the States showed that venture capitalists expect a fall of available capital in every sector except clean technology. In California green jobs have grown at a rate ten times faster than the States in total, and is strongest in Advanced Materials.

With investment in the environment, science and technology being given top billing by the Obama administration, investment in advanced green materials is going to be a must for any industry whether or not they traditionally see themselves in the green sector, and could prove to be an investment that may help to reverse the downward trend in manufacturing.

An area bursting with potential solutions for the green sector is biomimicry, design inspired by, or mimics, nature's forms, processes and systems. Nature has answered many of the innovation challenges we face today and often with constraints on resources, nature combines a handful of elements in the periodic table to make amazingly efficient structures at ambient temperatures, pressures and with benefit, rather than harm to the ecosystem. 

Sharks, not traditionally associated with positive comparisons, may well have a hand in benefitting both the economy and environment, through biomimicry inspired innovation.

 Car wrap manufacturer, Skinz, has developed a wrap which significantly reduces drag, and according to their own data, results in 18-20% improved fuel economy. The wrapper takes its inspiration from shark skin. If you’ve ever stroked a shark, you’ll have noticed that, like cats, it’s best to stroke them front to back. A back to front show of affection would duly result in shredded hands. It’s this arrangement of their outer skin the dentricles – that in part allows sharks move at the equivalent of 60 mph through the water with a minimum of drag. You’d think the smoother the surface the better the hydrodynamics, but the small interruptions the scales provide allow sharks to move through the water in a similar way to which dimples on golf balls give greater aerodynamic qualities. Speedo developed their Olympic swimwear using these principles reducing drag by up to 4%.

Norwegian fishermen turned the principle on its head and used the basking shark’s skin to increase drag and prevent slippage on deck.

Reducing drag has huge applications in many industries and in particular transport, where the potential to reduce both costs and environmental impact from emissions is sizeable. The US navy spends over $600 million a year fuelling their ships and submarines, $50 million of it could be snipped by reducing drag that results from biofouling, that is growth of creatures such as algae, barnacles, mussels on the ships’ hulls. Biocidal paints prevent attachment but are toxic and harmful to marine life, the same structure of the dentricles that allow for better hydrodynamics is also a poor host to the growth of extra marine life. Now several groups of researchers and engineers in the States and Germany have developed different solutions, from skins, to paint, to surfaces that mimic the structure of sharkskin. 

"At the US Office of Naval Research (ONR) in Arlington, Virginia, research to prevent biofouling is focused on biomimetics as well as chemistry and smart coatings.

"The ultimate solution is going to have to be a combination of things, maybe of topographies combined with some specific surface chemistry," says Dr Stephen McElvany, who manages environmental research projects at the ONR to develop nontoxic coatings for hulls."

Bigger savings are to be made in the airline industry too, and reducing drag has been the holy grail for many years. It's estimated that just a 1% reduction in drag is worth up to $200,000, and 25,000 gallons of fuel each year for just one airline, globally this would be worth around $1 billion pa, and a significant reduction in emissions. Dr. Amy Lang of University of Alabama, is researching whether the sharkskin structure could be applied to aircraft and result in up to 30% reduction in drag.

It will be interesting to see what new materials come out of these different pieces of research, and the potential applications they could have in other industries too.