Biomimicry #01: Intro to Toolkit for Tropical Building Skins
- Gregers Reimann
- 2 days ago
- 2 min read
We marvel at Nature. The beauty. The great variety of animals and plants. Biomimicry is all about drawing inspiration from Nature's design principles for our own means and purposes. The design of the first aircraft, for example, was inspired by the flight of pigeons. And the shape of the super fast Japanese bullet train drew inspiration from the beak of birds.
Biomimicry is a practise that learns from and mimics strategies found in Nature to solve human design challenges
The complex life forms that we see on Earth today are the result of 3.8 billion years of evolution, where those designs that worked were honed (aka survival), and those that did not were cast aside (aka extinction).
Biomimicry Levels
There are three different levels at which biomimicry design can be followed:
Form Mimicking the morphological features of a living organism to achieve a similar advantage
Process Mimicking the behaviour of a living organism that faces the challenge of limited resources
System Mimicking a living ecosystem where resources are optimised and waste generation is minimised to achieve what we commonly call a circular economy
The 'Ask Nature' website lists almost 2,000 different biological strategies that can be found in Nature and can serve as inspiration for biomimicry:
The website provides a useful overview of the different functions that Nature can provide, as well as an overview of what living systems (more than 400) have been studied.
Biomimicry for Buildings
In 2023, in their pursuit of practical biomimicry applications for tropical buildings, Anuj Jain and Saloni Swaminathan published a design toolkit book. The title of this 150-page book is "Biomimicry for Tropical Building Skins: A Design Toolkit to Manage Thermal Comfort Using Nature's Genius".
The toolkit gives gives a 6-step biomimicry-based design process, namely Define the Challenge, Biologise Function and Context, Discover Biological Strategies, Abstract Design Strategies, Emulate Nature's Lessons, and Evaluate Fit and Function.
The book also contains 30 biomimicry case studies from across the World. A great source of inspiration, albeit not all directly relevant to tropical building design.
One of the case studies, the thermally regulated InVert Auto-Shading Windows, will be the focus of a separate subsequent article in our biomimicry article series.
The book contains several useful illustrations, some of which are included in image gallery below.
The purpose of this article is to introduce the biomimicry principle and make the reader aware that there are available design resources - even for buildings in the tropics.
Biomimicry Workshop
If you are interested in hiring IEN Consultants to conduct a biomimicry design workshop, please write us an email to info@malaysia.com.my with the email title "Request for IEN Biomimicry Workshop"
