Biomimicry: Learning from Nature in the Age of AI

What you’ll do

Biomimicry is an emerging field where you learn how nature’s designs, strategies, and systems can inspire innovative solutions to human challenges. From the aerodynamics of birds inspiring flight to termite mounds influencing energy-efficient buildings, biomimicry explores how nature can become a powerful mentor for innovation, sustainability, technology, and design.

Conventional mechanical approaches to innovation are increasingly insufficient for the challenges posed by today’s complex systems, intelligent technologies, and rapidly evolving world. Nature, by contrast, has spent over 3.8 billion years testing, adapting, and refining solutions under the same conditions and constraints that humans face today — making natural systems some of the smartest, most efficient, resilient, and sustainable innovations ever created.

This studio introduces you to an interdisciplinary approach combining science, design, creativity, sustainability, systems thinking, and emerging technologies. Through interactive sessions, hands-on activities, nature exploration, games, videos, and collaborative challenges, you’ll explore patterns, structures, behaviours, and problem-solving strategies found in the natural world. You’ll also work with contemporary biomimicry tools and methodologies, including the growing role of AI in accelerating nature-inspired innovation. In teams, you’ll apply these approaches to develop a biomimicry-inspired concept or solution for a real-world challenge.

What you’ll walk away with

By the end of the course, you will be able to:

• Apply biomimicry principles to solve problems and develop innovative solutions, particularly in design, engineering, and business
• Understand nature’s deep patterns and life’s overarching principles, and how these can inform better, more sustainable design
• Explore and learn from nature at various levels — product, process, and systems
• Use methods and tools for applying biomimicry in problem-solving and innovation, especially in design and engineering
• Reconnect with nature by learning to observe and draw inspiration not just about nature but from nature — understanding natural systems through functional thinking

What you’ll make

You’ll be expected to actively participate in learning games, quizzes, assignments, and collaborative exercises designed to both facilitate and assess your learning. Specifically, each student will work on:

• Two individual assignments — submitted individually, then brought together as a collective compilation in the form of a flipbook, short film, indexed document, or visual compilation
• One group project / assignment — presented through visual media of the team’s choice (the ‘Biomimicry Challenge!’)

Your six days

Sessions run full-day (approx. 10am–5pm). No more than 1–2 hours of theory per day; the rest is hands-on.

How you’ll be assessed

Assessment combines facilitator evaluation with peer review, focusing on participation, creativity, collaboration, curiosity, and application of biomimicry principles.

Who it’s for

Open to students from different disciplines — a healthy mix is ideal. Good representation from engineering helps with cross-learning for students from non-technical backgrounds.

What you’ll need

The studio is run as a combination of classroom teaching and outdoor experiential learning. You’ll work in flexible seating arrangements, alternating between lectures and collaborative group work. Outdoor green space and trees will form part of the learning environment. Where available, a workshop space will be used for model-making experimentation.