How Designers Use Nature To Solve Problems | Answers With Joe

where i'm sitting right now in my house is about a mile or so away from some train tracks so from time to time i get to hear a nice little train rumble in the background it's not a problem or anything it doesn't happen that often and when it does it's just some mild background noise but i always wonder about the people who live right next to these train tracks like it must be a lot worse for them but even that is nothing compared to what some people had to experience in japan in 1989 japan is a world leader in high-speed trains especially maglev trains that cut down on friction and travel at hundreds of miles an hour so fast in fact that they were causing a kind of sonic boom okay so it's not like a real sonic boom because they weren't breaking the speed of sound or anything but as they were going through tunnels they were going so fast that they were compressing the air in front of them so that when they exited the tunnels it did kind of make an explosive noise so yeah imagine living in an apartment right next to the opening of a tunnel and hearing what basically sounds like a cannon going off several times a day so people complained about it obviously and the trains were forced to slow down kind of defeats the purpose of having a high speed train engineers set forth working on the problem most of which required redesigning the tunnels in some way which have been a huge construction project but one engineer named aiji nakatsu had a different idea turned out he was also an avid bird watcher and one of his favorite birds was the kingfisher kingfishers eat fish hence the name and they do it by flying over water finding a school of fish zeroing in on the one that they want and then dive bombing into the water at full speed it's actually kind of insane and these birds are designed to do this and create as little splash as possible to make this hunting more effective and nikatsu recognized that these birds were kind of doing the same thing that these high-speed trains were doing they were moving from one medium to another birds obviously are going from air to water but these trains were going from low pressure to high pressure so similar idea so he used the shape of the kingfisher's beak as a model and used that to redesign the front of the train and it worked not only did it cut down on noise but it made it 15 more efficient and 10 faster this is an amazing example of lateral thinking but it's also a great example of a design philosophy known as biomimicry [Music] if you think technology is advancing at a rapid pace you're right in fact it's kind of been advancing at a rapid pace for a few hundred years now i mean just looking at what humans have created since the age of enlightenment is mind-boggling some of the engineering and technological feats include the telescope the submarine interchangeable parts coffee pots plows sewing machines power tools skyscrapers televisions and the artificial heart we can spend all day listing all the inventions that have been created since the 1600s in fact i would bet pretty much everything around you as you're watching this would fit into that category once again i've been making the argument for a while now that you know people talk about the singularity is this moment this thing that's going to happen in the near future my argument is we're living in the singularity it's been going on for a couple hundred years now this especially makes sense when you consider that homo sapiens has been on earth for about 300 000 years all this has happened very suddenly all the innovations we've created from fire to file sharing is just a blink of the eye to nature nature has been testing and designing and reinventing itself for literally billions of years earth has been around for about 4.5 billion years life first appeared on our planet about 3.5 to 4 billion years ago multicellular organisms began to appear about 610 million years ago and plants and fungi showed up around 500 million years ago after that came arthropods amphibians mammals and birds then us of course we're just little babies in the history of life on earth during all these billions of years nature has been doing its own research and development constantly coming up with new solutions and ways to survive and thrive there's just no way that we can compete with this level of knowledge this deep trial and error that nature's been going through all this time whether you believe in a creator that intelligently designed the universe or think it's just a process and time is the creator we have a lot we can learn from it and this is the basis for biomimicry it's a way for us to find solutions by looking at nature or quote the practice of applying lessons from nature to the invention of healthier more sustainable technologies for people as defined by the biomimicry institute according to biologists and the institute's co-founder janine binyas quote learning about the natural world is one thing learning from the natural world that's the switch so when it comes to designing solutions for the challenges that we face it makes sense to look at the greatest teacher we have available nature and there are several examples of nature influence solutions here's a few of my favorites first up is velcro let's let her rip and start with one that's kind of sticky i'm talking of course about velcro which swiss engineer george de mestral invented and patented in 1955. as the story goes about 10 years before that he was out hunting with his dog out in the alps and he noticed some burrs got caught in his dog's fur being the curious type he took the burrs home and looked at them under a microscope and he saw they all had these tiny little hooks on them that made them grab on to to fur and clothing and whatnot so eventually he figured out a way to mass produce tiny little hooks like that and found a company that produced a sort of a carpet fiber thing that he could attach it to and velcro was born velcro by the way is a portmandu of velvet and crochet which means hook in french the velcro wasn't an immediate success people didn't automatically gravitate toward this thing not until nasa came along and needed a way to keep objects stuck to the wall so they wouldn't be floating around in in space and whatnot and then it kind of became cool because nasa so cool that french fashion designer pierre cardin became obsessed with it and put it in a lot of his fashion designs and of course they're quite popular with sneaker heads as well oh he got the gopros let's talk about sharks for a minute so sharks you know they instill fear in swimmers and surfers on beaches and whatnot they cause some people to need a bigger boat but they have also inspired technology that helps reduce the spread of bacteria dr anthony brennan is a materials science and engineering professor at the university of florida in 2002 he visited the u.s naval base at pearl harbor to help the military find new anti-fouling strategies for its ships and submarines he noticed one submarine returning to port covered in algae and said it looked like a lumbering whale but then he asked himself what's an example of a slow-moving ocean animal that doesn't attract algae and sharks came to mind so he took an impression of shark skin specifically the dermal denticles and discovered that they are arranged in a diamond pattern with tiny riblets these riblets are rough and help keep microorganisms from attaching themselves to the shark's skin like most organisms bacteria always look for the path of least resistance when they're trying to set up a little colony whatever is going to cost more energy they're not going to do and the little riblets on these shark scales provided just enough energy resistance to prevent them from forming on there so a company called sharklet technologies has started creating products based on this natural innovation the company's research has shown that its antibacterial film inhibits the growth of s aureus p oregonosa e coli and other microbial species that may cause illness or even death sharks saving lives since 2002 but maybe the newest example of biomimicry is something called micro flyers a paper published in the journal nature just a couple of months ago in september proposed the idea of tiny flying microchips about the size of a grain of sand it was proposed by some engineers at northwestern university and the idea is that the wind could carry these microchips around and they could be used to monitor things like pollution and airborne diseases and they based these micro flyers off of the maple trees propeller seeds these propellers cause the seeds to spin like a helicopter through the air before landing and these microflires do the same thing according to john a rogers who led the device's development quote our goal was to add winged flight to small-scale electronic systems we were able to do that using ideas inspired by a biological world we borrowed those design concepts adapted them and applied them to electronic circuit platforms so there's two parts of the micro flyers the little millimeter size electronic components and the wings and as it falls the wings interact with the air to create a slow and stable rotational motion and the weight of the electronic is low and center to keep it from losing stability and just kind of like gently fly to the ground they fabricated precursors defying structures in flat planar geometries before bonding them over a stretched rubber substrate when the substrate relaxes a controlled buckling action happens and the wings pop up into precise 3d forms and if you're worried that all these micro flyers might create a lot of electronic litter don't be worried they're actually made out of biodegradable parts so they'll just dissolve in water speaking of wind let's talk about humpback whales wait what humpbacks have tiny bumps on their fins called tubercles and these tubercles are thought to help them fly more efficiently through the water to test this a westchester university biologist named dr frank fish put a four meter long flipper from a dead beached whale in a wind tunnel his name is frank fish and he's testing on whales we're in the matrix anyway frankfish found that the flipper was fairly aerodynamic these bumps on the flippers help the whales catch bigger and faster prey by channeling the water over the flipper to prevent loss of forward movement and this helps the whales turn and move more quickly underwater interesting finding but what can we do with that well frankfish and his team realize that you can apply this to wind turbines and make them quieter and more efficient by increasing lift and reducing wind vortices so they tried it and it turns out that wind farms can get 20 percent more power and 25 percent more airflow using this according to mit the blades help generate quote the same amount of power at 10 miles per hour that conventional turbines generate at 17 miles per hour but it's not just engineering and structural problems that can be benefited by biomimicry we can also apply it to social structures as well for example we can better understand traffic by looking at ants a study published in e-life in 2019 showed that ants adjust their behavior based on their circumstances when moving along a path the researchers wrote quote they speed up in intermediate densities avoid collisions at large densities and avoid entering overcrowded trails unquote mimicking these strategies might help optimize self-driving cars to prevent traffic jams and there's also a lot we can learn from bees about social learning when a worker honeybee finds a new food source they return to the hive and perform a waggle dance this dance communicates where the food source is and works to influence other bees behavior so that they'll try to find this new food source another larger group of bees will explore the new source and then they'll return to the hive and they'll all do the dance too this cycle happens a few times and reaches a tipping point where the whole bee colony makes a decision and moves together toward the food source this strategy suggests that social consensus accelerates and influences learning according to mit professor alex pintlen adopting habits is a very conservative process that seems to be driven very largely by social learning by seeing other people doing the same thing because bees in the hive are open to finding this new food source they're able to continue growing the colony so this this waggle dance is not entertainment it's survival bees ants and even fungi can teach us about elections and democracy as well our governmental system here in the u.s is based mostly on hierarchy and maintaining the status quo it doesn't allow for much flexibility which leads to the dreaded red tape but for organisms like fungi flexible intelligence has allowed them to adapt and survive over billions of years but fungi decisions are made with a bottom-up approach they're constantly feeding themselves a diverse array of information and reacting to real-time conditions according to evolutionary biologist dr tamson wooley barker collective intelligence and distributed leadership are evolutionarily proven strategies for success diversity and independence networked by transparent and truthful transactions allow the wisdom of the crowd to go to work with flat networks we can innovate better make more accurate decisions and enjoy far greater resilience but maybe the biggest lesson that we can learn from nature is that nothing is ever wasted nature is the definition of sustainable and our current way of living is the definition of unsustainable maybe by taking some cues from nature we can design a society that will last indefinitely into the future one of the goals of biomimicry advocates is for designers to first ask themselves how would nature solve this problem when trying to find a solution and i think that's a smart approach nature has been around far longer than we have and we have a lot to learn from it if we want to continue into the future with it but speaking of great design let's talk glasses many of you know that about this time last year i got lasik meaning i didn't need contacts anymore or the trusted glasses that i'd had for about 10 years which have now become just a part of my background but as it turns out once i got my distance vision fixed i realized just how bad my close-up vision has gotten because i have the old so now it's time for reading glasses and i actually went and got two pair from today's sponsor warby parker yes long before i became a soulless shill i was a customer and i went with warby because i did like their designs but also because they let you try them on at home all you have to do is go on their site find out the five designs you'd like to try and they send you a try on home kit and i wound up going with these two and i wear them now whenever i'm reading or whenever i'm on my computer which is most of the time which means that i am actually wearing glasses far more now than i ever did before i got lasik go figure and now i need some new sunglasses so i got another try at home kit will be parker's glasses start at 95 including prescription lenses prescription sunglasses and now they have contacts as well they ship the glasses to you you can try them for five days and when you're done you send them back there's no obligation to buy and they cover all the shipping depending on where you live there are also warby parker stores where you can get eye exams and other vision care by licensed opticians and if you're extra lazy you can go to the warby parker app and do a virtual try on right on your phone and with every purchase warby parker donates a pair of glasses to someone in need so it's good for you it's good for them and you can apply any fsa or hsa dollars that you have toward them so it might be easier than you think so if you're in need of new glasses contacts sunglasses whatever it might be anything that needs to go over your eyes just go to warbyparker.com joe scott and get five pairs that you can try on for free at home yeah might say they're easy on the eyes thanks to warby parker for supporting this video and a huge shout out to all the answer files on patreon who have been supporting this channel for a long time and forming an awesome community just being really great people i've got some new names to shout out real quick we got anonymous freak paul pilcher funk doctor all right michael ruprecht thomas watts lou lynn kenworthy sylvie barger sick especially benjamin ross emily rose sean banks and amy ruth thank you guys so much if you'd like to join them get early access to videos be part of an awesome community get access to discord and all this cool stuff you can go to patreon.com answerswithjoe please do like and share this video if you liked it and if this is your first time here maybe click on this one because google thinks you might like that one or any of the others down here that have my face on them and if you enjoy them i invite you to subscribe i come back with videos every monday all right that's it for now you guys go out there have an eye opening rest of the week stay safe and i'll see you next monday love you guys take care

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 350,352

Keywords: answers with joe, joe scott

Id: i9St4aTUVis

Length: 14min 41sec (881 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 15 2021