Biomimetic design of systems

Why do most popular environmental solutions just rearange the deck chairs on the Titanic? Is overpolulation really a problem? Can green products help increase the profitability of your business? Michael Braungart tackles these questions in this brilliant lecture.  He is explaining how much we need to know if we are to make the world a better place. And how much detail we already do know but which we sometimes stubbornly ignore.

Michael created the concept of “Cradle to Cradle” as a young chemist, and in 2002, with his American friend Bill McDonough, the bestseller Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things was published. Cradle to Cradle Design advocates a biomimetic approach to the design of systems. It models human industry on nature’s processes, in which materials are viewed as nutritients circulating in healthy, safe metabolisms. It suggests that industry must protect and enrich ecosystems, nature’s biological metabolism while also maintaining safe, productive technical metabolism for the high-quality use and circulation of organic, synthetic, and other materials. Put simply, it is a holistic economic, industrial and social framework, that are not just efficient but are essentialy waste free. The model in its broadest sense, is not limited to industry, it can be applied to many different aspects of human civilisation including urban environments, buildings, industrial design and manufacturing, economics, and social systems.

How could this approach apply to industrial design? Think temporal ownership. You buy something and sell it off to extract the remaining value when you don’t need it anymore. For example I tend to buy a new Apple Macbook every two years. Building a technical product for sustainability just doesn’t make sense. I don’t use my laptop for 50 years. As product life cycles of technical products become shorter and shorter it would make sense for manufacturers to use materials that can be recycled 100% to build the next version of your gadget.