Area 03
Natural Sciences
Forestry, ecology, and biomimicry — reading what living systems have already solved over deep time, and borrowing the structure.
What this area is
Living systems have spent a very long time solving problems of energy, structure, and efficiency under hard constraints. We treat that as a design library. The work here starts from a biological form that already works and asks what, precisely, makes it work — then tests whether the same structure earns its keep on a problem of our own.
Lines of work
Heliomorph
Biomimetic solar. Arranging photovoltaic collectors in a plant-canopy geometry to win more usable energy per unit of land than a flat panel — now that the collector itself is cheap. The form is borrowed from the branching structure of a eucalyptus; the open question is how much of that structure is actually load-bearing.
Detail page forthcoming