CARLOS GARCIA
Have you ever wondered why so many nature imitating things are considered Innovation?
I’ve noticed that biomimmicry is another “sexy” trend and presents nature-based designs as INNOVATION. According to Janine Benyus Biomimicry is “innovation inspired by nature” (watch this interview in spanish or this conference in english). It is interesting, no doubt.
Nature has been described as the success of blind and purposeless accidents, that caused the evolution of the species until they adopted fully functional adaptations to certain environments. For those of us who struggle hard every single day of our professional carrers as engineers this approach seems an insult. I mean that I cannot imagine what kind of customer would accept a 30 million years schedule and some billion prototypes.
I feel that the engineering approach takes fairly less time to reach the goals, maybe only four or five thousand years for basic research, and some hundred years more for prototyping, and certainly only a hundred more for acomplete line of products. This has been the case of flying machines, from Icarus and his predecessors to Leonardo Da Vinci’s first good drawings and analysis, and then to Wright brothers aeroplane, today jets and rockets, and from here to Buzz Lightyear’s ‘ “To infinite and beyond…”.
However I fully agree with Biomimicry fans in only one thing: SUSTAINABILITY, which in fact is one of Nature’s prime goal; unfortunately engineering has always showed a lack of awareness on it. Just think of coal based steam machines, then to fuel, which has driven to our own industrial extinction, global warming, etc.
I think it’s time for engineers (as a species within human kind) to adopt a new evolution line, oriented to sustained success, or to face extinction, in a natural way.
Carlos García Pando
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