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I met some of the enthusiastic folks from San Diego at the Bioneers conference in October and so I’m really pleased to see their efforts moving forward:

	Subject : Biomimicry and the San Diego Zoo Date : Tue, 30 Dec 2008 15:01:00 -0800 From : “Helen Cheng” <HCheng@sandiegozoo.org>

Happy New Year!

Thank you for your interest in biomimicry in San Diego.  San Diego has been a hotbed of biomimicry activities in 2008, and we would like to share just a few highlights.

For an introduction biomimicry and the San Diego Zoo’s activities in this area, attached is an article from the January edition of ZooNooz.

Partnership with the City of San Diego
We are delighted to announce the San Diego Zoo’s partnership with the City of San Diego to promote biomimicry in the San Diego region.  The City of San Diego is a biotech, clean tech and high tech hub; it houses top-notch research and academic institutions; is a biodiversity hotspot; and is an ideal place to work, visit and play.  San Diego is the natural hub for biomimicry, and we look forward to building biomimicry education and services in this community.

Biomimicry Education and Awareness
The San Diego Zoo has entered into a year-long partnership with High Tech High in which students are designing biomimetic invention based on plants or animals.  The San Diego Zoo recently sponsored students from High Tech High to attend the Bioneers conference in San Rafael, CA, to learn more about how biomimicry is being applied in industry.

We offer a variety of educational programs for high school and college students at the Zoo or Wild Animal Park.  From introductory presentations to day-long interactive workshops that teach biomimicry in a hands-on way, students will learn how nature can help them in their future careers.

Corporate Retreats
The San Diego Zoo offers corporate retreats with a focus on green business practices and biomimicry.  Companies can choose modules that introduce sustainability and/or biomimicry, go on special biomimicry tours, and even participate in interactive exercises that train researchers, designers and engineers to think about problem-solving in a different way.  These retreats can be held at the Zoo or at our LEED Certified conservation research facilities.

For more information on any of our programs, please visit zoobiomimicry.org.  You may also call or email us at the contact information listed below.

San Diego Sustainability Business Forum

Wednesday, February 4, 2009
8 a.m. – 6 p.m.
Price: $50 per person

Presented by ESI, the San Diego Natural History Museum and others

Learn how to increase green practices and profits in a day-long forum for leaders of small- and medium-sized businesses.

DESCRIPTION: Can your company’s bottom line and business practices both be green?

Fred Krupp, author of Earth: The Sequel, begins this forum with an important talk about our energy future. This second-annual sustainability forum is designed to help leaders of small- and medium-sized businesses improve their bottom line while making choices that help protect the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the natural habitats that make southern California such a desirable place to live. This day-long meeting will include panel presentations, case studies, discussions, practical break-out sessions, and fascinating information about new practices, innovations, and technologies that can make your company greener, more competitive, and more profitable. Lunch included.

For more information, visit https://tickets.sdnhm.org/public/show.asp

Thank you for your support of biomimicry and sustainability in San Diego!

Helen Cheng
Office of Conservation Finance
Zoological Society of San Diego
PO Box 120551
San Diego, CA 92112-0551
Tel: (619) 557-3927
Cel: (619) 517-3216
hcheng@sandiegozoo.org

Jon Prange
Venture Business Office
Zoological Society of San Diego
(619) 231-1515 ext. 4587
(619) 231-0249 fax
jprange@sandiegozoo.org

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As we close out a great year for biomimicry, here’s a short article from the Washington Post’s ‘Green’ section:

For some, whale watching is a tourist activity. For Gunter Pauli, it is a source of technological inspiration.

“I see a whale, I see a six-to-12-volt electric generator that is able to pump 1,000 liters per pulse through more than 108 miles of veins and arteries,” he said. The intricate wiring of the whale’s heart is being studied as a model for a device called a nanoscale atrioventricular bridge, which will undergo animal testing next year and could replace pacemakers for the millions of people whose diseased hearts need help to beat steadily. Continued at the Washington Post…

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I first visited San Francisco in 1985 on my way to Boston for MacWorld Expo. I returned a few months later for the west coast MacWorld. Little did I know that key pieces of the ‘revolutionary’ Mac technolgy were demonstrated in same convention center almost two decades earlier, on December 9th, 1968. It has since come to be known as the Mother of all Demos and today hundreds of tech luminaries gathered to honour the brilliant man behind that demo, Doug Englebart.

On December 9, 1968, Dr. Douglas C. Engelbart and the Augmentation Research Center (ARC) at Stanford Research Institute staged a 90-minute public multimedia demonstration at the Fall Joint Computer Conference in San Francisco. It was the world debut of personal and interactive computing: for the first time, the public saw a computer mouse, which controlled a networked computer system to demonstrate hypertext linking, real-time text editing, multiple windows with flexible view control, cathode display tubes, and shared-screen teleconferencing.

It changed what is possible. The 1968 demo presaged many of the technologies we use today, from personal computing to social networking. The demo embodied Doug Engelbart’s vision of solving humanity’s most important problems by using computers to improve communication and collaboration.

Today was another great reminder of why I moved to San Francisco! 

Full coverage via Google News and Technorati, plus an interesting mindmap/timeline. (Unfortunately much of the coverage focuses on the mouse, but Doug the mouse was just a tiny piece of the puzzle he was solving.)

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I REALLY like press releases that open like this:

Biomimicry – technological innovation inspired by nature – is one of the hottest ideas in science…

But what a downer then to read:

…but has yet to yield many practical advances.

Ooops, too fast, now the good news!

Time for a change. Scientists with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) have mimicked the structure of mother of pearl to create what may well be the toughest ceramic ever produced.

Check out how they are putting relatively weak components together in such a way to make a much tougher and more durable material. Continued at Berkeley Lab press release…

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In the late 80s I represented Seattle based Aldus Corporation. Aldus was one of a handful of companies that fostered “desktop publishing”. A combination of software (like Aldus PageMaker), the Apple LaserWriter and the Mac (not to mention the mouse and high resolution monitors) enabled regular folks to publish high quality newsletters, magazines and books. It was revolutionary. I’m seeing a similar revolution underway in design and construction industry with the introduction of products like ShopBot.

We’ve simplified CNC router technology so any shop can do fast, precise CNC cutting, drilling, and machining, and take advantage of CNC production automation. A ShopBot CNC router is robust, affordable, easy to use, and adapts to your production needs.

Like the early days of desktop publishing , many of the early examples are decorative, even whimsical, but in the just a couple of years designers and builders will understand the technology and use it to design products more in tune with natural systems. (i.e. nature does not build with 4×2s…)

See also http://www.carvewright.com/cms/machine

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Sustainable business and clean technology expert (and fellow Biomimicry Institute board member) Joel Makower offers a great overview of AskNature in this post:

AskNature.org brings much of that wisdom to the public — a free service of the nonprofit Biomimicry Institute (on whose board I sit), with funding from design software company Autodesk. The database is the only public-domain online library of its kind, where users can search for and study nature’s solutions to design challenges. Continued…

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Bob Dylan’s “…for the times they are a changing…” echoed in the cavernous main hall of Boston’s Conference and Exhibition Center as two modern-day ‘rock stars’ prepared to take the stage for Greenbuild’s closing presentation. 29,752 showed up this week despite the turmoil in financial markets and thousands were inspired and learn about two critical sustainability tools.

A building conference may seem an odd place for two biologists to keynote, but as the first keynoter E.O Wilson reminded us in his opening “We are a biological species living in a biological world” so it is crucial that science and the future oriented businesses represented by the attendees come together. 

Just one statistic he offered us: 60,000 known fungi, and the total may be north a million. But the human species is destroying biodiversity before we even know what we have. Wison is working to correct that through the Encyclopedia of Life.  

Fellow keynoter Janine Benyus talked about a second tool: www.asknature.org where we can now ask the question “How would nature do this?” and then flip through a catalog of nature’s most ingenious solutions. The Biomimicry Guild and the Biomimicry Institute provided the ’starter culture’ and Janine urged the audience

We live in a very narrow band of what nature offers and now the potential for creative responses to our greatest challenges is exponentially easier - thank you Janine and EO for these extraordinary gifts. May they soon help us transform our culture from occupier to student, learning how to live sustainably, meeting our needs in ways more conducive to life.

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Many years in the making, The Biomimicry Institute’s Ask Nature portal will be formally launched tomorrow, but a few lucky visitors to Autodesk’s booth enjoyed a preview presented by the Janine.

Just one example: Janine and the team have identified 78 strategies nature uses to reduce drag. Incredible!

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I’m headed to Boston tomorrow for the annual GreenBuild conference and expo. I have two agendas, first to find a few more innovative solutions for our home project, and second to be on hand for the launch of the Biomimicry Institute’s “AskNature” database/portal:

Autodesk, a leader in design innovation technologies, has announced the sponsorship of AskNature.org, the world’s first biomimicry database, featuring biology-inspired design strategies. Architects, designers and engineers can access and harness nature’s billions of years of evolution through this free, online public-domain library, filled with some of nature’s best strategies, organized by function and explained with illustrations and in language relevant to designers. Continued…

And if you’re attending GreenBuild, let me know and lets connect!

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In a rousing opening address at this year’s Bioneers conference, event co-founder Kenny Ausubel outlined his vision:

“…to re-imagine how to live on Earth in ways that honor the web of life, each other and future generations.” He went on to highlight biomimicry as “arguably the single most important design strategy to shoot the rapids of the next ten years.”

You can read Kenny’s complete address at The Huffington Post.

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