“You can attract things with money, but if someone else offers more money, those things leave. With place-based development [meeting local needs without imports, like nature does], we aren’t competing with other regions, yet we’re going to have an innovative system that is unmatched in the world.”
—– Don Knechtes: Founder of The Great Lakes Innovation and Development Enterprise (GLIDE), a nationally recognized regional business and technology incubator based in Lorain County, Ohio, that has been praised by President Obama
“Mimicry improves the civilization, but copy doesn’t.”
—– Huang KaiYu, Student, College of Design & Innovation
“When the forest and the city are functionally indistinguishable, then we know we have reached sustainability.”
—– Janine Benyus, President, Biomimicry 3.8 Institute
“So I think that it is not just a technological question, it’s also an important philosophical one. Unless we understand ourselves as part of nature, biomimicry will never realize its full potential.”
—– Hu DongYing 胡冬莹, Student, College of Design & Innovation
“MIn a word, we need more people to join in biomimicry, and in order to do so, we ourselves must start first.”
—– Zhang Mo, Industrial Design Student, College of Design & Innovation
“As a designer and educator, we typically consider our “lab” to be the natural environment and explore the outdoors.”
—– Karen Sullivan, Architect & LEED AP, VIA Design, Ltd., www.VIA-Design-Ltd.com
“How amazing it is.”
—– Guo KeYu, Student, College of Design & Innovation
“…the true genius of life [… i]s in how its technologies contribute to the continuation of not just one life but all life on earth.”
—– Ding WangShu, Student, College of Design & Innovation
“If we could learn to make things and do things the way nature does, we could achieve factor 10, factor 100, maybe even factor 1,000 savings in resource and energy use.”
—– Michael Pawlyn, Architect & Founder, Explore
“The final purpose of biomimicry is to design things that fit every law of nature, just like nature designs them.”
—– Liu LiWei, Industrial Design Student, College of Design & Innovation
“I think that the real way to apply Biomimicry in Design is to study how the creatures live and keep the balance of the nature.[…]the way they live with other creatures harmoniously is the most important for us to study and apply in Design. Maybe, one product can be digested by another one and you don’t even need to worry about the recycling, or maybe the waste created by one product can be used as the energy or material of the others.”
—– Liang ZhanZhao梁展钊, Industrial Design Student, College of Design & Innovation
“I believe that biomimicry is one of a small handful of very important ideas that will change the way design is done.”
—– Hu JiaYing, Visual Communications Student, College of Design & Innovation
“…we are kind of ignoring the existing systems, cycles and environment, focusing on the problems and solutions only, thus design something that is so isolated that it could be used anywhere. However, anywhere equals nowhere; nature never designs something that could live anywhere.”
—– Xue Yang, Environmental Design Student, College of Design & Innovation
“Someone said that innovation is to combine two seemingly unconnected objects together, and then to create a new design. I think biomimicry is a kind of innovation […] that is trying to find the inner connections of natural objects.”
—– Zhou Jian, Visual Communications Student, College of Design & Innovation