The Wall Street Journal-20080111-WEEKEND JOURNAL- The Home Front- Mother Nature- Design Guru- Owls- Sunflowers- Sea Urchins Inspire Showerheads- Lights- Butterfly-Drapes Get Grounded
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WEEKEND JOURNAL; The Home Front: Mother Nature, Design Guru; Owls, Sunflowers, Sea Urchins Inspire Showerheads, Lights; Butterfly-Drapes Get Grounded
What do sunflowers, lotus leaves, owls and sea urchins have in common?
Designers are imitating both the way they look and the way they work to create better-functioning products for the home -- a process known as biomimicry. Companies are coming out with bathroom fixtures, draperies, paint -- even swizzle sticks -- inspired by designs from nature.
Studying the natural world is nothing new for designers, of course. Both Leonardo da Vinci and the Wright brothers looked to bat and bird wings when they dreamed up their "flying machines," while inventor George de Mestral got his idea for Velcro more than a half-century ago when the tiny hooks on burrs stuck to his socks during a hike.
In home products, however, the practice has only recently caught on, an offshoot of the fashionable green movement. Biomimicry as an industry and scientific discipline is so new that analysts don't cover it and universities are just beginning to teach it. "It's still gestating," says Chris Meyer, chief executive of Monitor Networks, a Cambridge, Mass., business-consulting firm, and author of "It's Alive: The Coming Convergence of Information, Biology and Business."
Plumbing giant Moen has introduced a showerhead whose spray holes are inspired by a Fibonacci spiral, the branching or spiral shapes often found in natural objects like the whorls of seeds in a sunflower. Moen's ads promise the showerhead has fuller coverage and three times the spray power of regular showerheads. Chien Cheng, an Irving, Texas, medical research scientist, bought the $35 showerhead when he remodeled his bath six months ago, and says it somehow creates an effect that's more powerful yet less pounding than the showerhead he replaced. "It feels like rain," he says.
Although biomimicry can incorporate elements of both form and function, the attraction of some products is primarily aesthetic. In July, Design Within Reach, a San Francisco-based catalog and chain of furniture stores, released a collection of $500 to $7,500 pendant light fixtures by New Zealand designer David Trubridge. The three minimalist white fixtures have crisscrossed "skeletons" modeled on coral, sea-urchin shells and crayfish, respectively. Mark Sullivan, director of a federal government loan program, bought the $500 coral pendant in October to go with the midcentury modern decor in his Washington, D.C., condo. To him, the appeal of the fixture, which throws off a pattern of shadows that gives an otherworldly, underwater feeling, is that it suggests a coral reef without copying it. "Anything literal I would get tired of fast," says Mr. Sullivan, who likes nonrepresentational furnishings.
Other products are more utilitarian. Last January, German manufacturer Ziehl-Abegg introduced to the U.S. an air-conditioning fan blade for commercial cooling systems called the Owlet. It mimics the serrated edges of the owl's wing, which allows the predator to hunt silently at night. The company says the 24-inch blades are six to eight decibels quieter than the typical smooth fan blade. That's roughly the difference between listening to a single car pass by on a roadway and enduring a freeway at rush hour.
Evo Design of Watertown, Conn., created the "olive buoy" -- a plastic float that sits atop a garnish-skewering toothpick -- for retailer Crate and Barrel. The floating toothpick, modeled after buoyant tropical-tree pods, allows martini drinkers to eat the olive without getting their fingers wet.
In July, FLOR, a division of InterfaceFLOR in Atlanta, launched the Tufted Frond pattern in its carpet tiles, which looks like scattered palm fronds littering a beach, as part of its new Martha Stewart Floor Designs (other styles in the nature-themed collection are called Acorn, Branch, Brook and Reed). Barbara Eichenblatt, a retired space planner, recently redid her master bedroom with the tiles, which cost $16 apiece. She says the palm pattern and nubby surface remind her of the scene outside her Sarasota, Fla., window. Because the tiles use random patterns, not the repeating patterns found on many other carpet tiles, the squares don't need to be matched up, so they were easier to install. She also likes the fact that the company provides postage- paid envelopes to return stained or worn tiles for recycling.
But there are caveats to biomimicry. While many ideas that come from nature are creative, not all are commercial successes. A few years ago, a San Francisco company called Deepa Textiles launched an iridescent drapery fabric based on the light-reflecting qualities of a butterfly's wings, but the product, and ultimately the company, disappeared. Nike, meantime, stopped selling Goat Tek, a springy hiking shoe with prongs modeled after a mountain goat's feet, after one season. Nike spokesman KeJuan Wilkins says Goat Tek was "well received" by runners but wouldn't say why it was canceled. He adds that what Nike learned about traction and stability has been applied to other styles.
And biomimic products don't always live up to their claims. Sto Corp. of Atlanta developed Sto Lotusan, a "self-cleaning" house paint modeled on the lotus plant, whose leaves are covered with tiny points that hold dirt and moisture away from the leaf's surface. "Water and dirt flow off immediately," says the company's Web site. Donald Silpe, a retired meat processing executive, had his Manalapan, Fla., home and two outbuildings painted with Sto-Lotusan a little over a year ago on the recommendation of a painting contractor. But he says dirt has built up in some places. And when a company representative, who visited him in November, sprayed water on one wall, it didn't bead up and roll off. The company says it didn't notice any dirt on the walls, and that water didn't roll off that day because it was humid, and the wall, which was in shade, was covered with a thin layer of dew. "I don't buy that," says Mr. Silpe.
Some product designers, like San Francisco consultant Jeremy Faludi, are skeptical of biomimicry. Not everything that evolved though natural selection is relevant to problems designers face, he says. For instance, the eyes of bats, crabs and starfish are energy-efficient in metabolic terms, but they sense only light and dark. That means they aren't good models for trying to improve how a mechanical object "sees."
Nevertheless, the innovations continue. Many are the result of interdisciplinary university programs springing up here and abroad -- from six in the U.S. two years ago to 19 today, according to the Biomimicry Institute, a Missoula, Mont.-based nonprofit educational group. "It's a place for biologists, chemists, engineers and architects to learn to talk to one another -- and they normally don't," says biology professor Jeannette Yen, who directs the Center for Biologically Inspired Design at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.
Her colleagues and students are looking into making decorative panels that can change color like an octopus and robots that can sense nearby objects without touching them, much like fish swimming in schools. Applications under development in other universities and private labs range from pipes with interiors that replicate shark skin, so water will flow faster, to superstrong tape that copies the action of a gecko, which clings to surfaces through the molecular attraction of the tiny hairs on its feet.
Much of this activity was inspired by the Biomimicry Institute's founder, natural-history writer Janine Benyus, who conducts seminars with manufacturers and trade groups. Ms. Benyus christened the movement in 1997 with the publication of her book "Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature." A year later, she founded the institute as well as the Biomimicry Guild, a consulting firm that takes product designers and biologists to Central and South American jungles to observe how nature solves problems. For instance, the groups examine how the forest breaks down leaf matter without leaving waste. Over billions of years, she says, organisms have evolved elegant solutions to challenges similar to ones designers face. "The answers are all around us," she says.
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Natural Inspiration
Not everything that is inspired by nature is biomimicry, according to Janine Benyus, the natural history writer who spearheaded the movement. Here's a glossary of some bio-movements that are influencing designers and scientists.
BIOMORPHISM
Literally: Resembling a living organism
Definition: Art historian Alfred H. Barr Jr. first used the word in 1936 to describe nonrepresentational art that uses organic shapes. It's now also applied to some industrial designs.
Example: Philippe Starck's 2001 Tooth Stool, which resembles a molar.
BIOMIMICRY
Literally: Imitating life
Definition: The practice of using solutions to problems found in nature to solve human challenges. The word was coined by Ms. Benyus in 1997.
Example: The Eastgate Centre in Harare, Zimbabwe, which is modeled after a termite mound to vent heat efficiently.
BIOPHILA
Literally: Love of living things
Definition: Finding the human connection to other species and forms of life. The term was proposed by Erich Fromm in 1964.
Example: The University of Guelph-Humber Building in Canada, which has a four-story "biowall" covered in plants.
BIOTECHNOLOGY
Literally: Technology based on biology
Definition: Using organisms to supply human needs. Although practiced ever since humans used yeast to bake bread, Karl Ereky, a Hungarian engineer, named the field in 1919. Now it often refers to drugs based on biology.
