Fast Company blogger Jody Turner offers some insights from a recent talk:
I was attending Janine Benyus’ talk, Biomimicry in the Built World: Consulting Nature as Model, Measure, and Mentor, sponsored by the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley. As the founder of an early-stage electronics startup and with a background in economics, I was skeptical of the relevance to my own interests, aside from my boyish curiosity of cool animals which had brought me in the door. But as the presentation began and the screen behind her lit up with brilliant panoramas of diverse ecosystems, then zoomed down to wildly imaginative macros of plants, animals, and fungi custom-built for survival, synapses fired and a storm cloud of ideas gathered strength. Nature, it seems, is an expert in efficient systems. By observing these systems and the problems they solve we can tap into millions of years of evolutional R&D.
Continued at http://www.fastcompany.com/1583698/biomimicry-design-the-answer-may-be-zebra.