ARLENE GOLDBARD ON THE BIOLOGICAL METAPHOR
Here’s a wonderful essay….
When it comes to ambulatory life-forms, the developmental timeline is shorter, but the same principle pertains: it is a good idea for human beings to pay attention to systems and solutions that have evolved over time in natural contexts, because something very like them may work just as well in cultural contexts.
That has a sensible ring to it, doesn’t it? Yet we are just now emerging from an era so contaminated with technological hubris that the opposite has generally been deemed true: nature is messy and inefficient, so it’s much better to model our interventions on machines, where standardization and uniformity prevail—and then let human beings, that infinitely obliging species, adapt to the result. Janine Benyus’s fascinating talk focuses on solutions to manufacturing and conservation problems that use shape and texture and process derived from nature to create light, flexible, strong innovations instead of our typical expensively manufactured modern-era counterparts.