Every day, designers strive to make better, smarter and more efficient products. Designers are innovators, and take inspiration from all around them. This, of course, includes nature. The term for this is biomimicry, simply defined as the practice of emulating nature in technological and industrial design. It’s nothing new: Leonardo da Vinci, for example, studied the anatomy and flights patterns in birds in the hope of enabling human flight.
As every company strives to differentiate their products through design, biomimicry remains a critical discipline. And in the age of a pending climate crisis where organizations are heavily focused on designing sustainable products with minimal environmental impact, the study of natural processes can be more important than ever. Nature is a good teacher: studying natural ecosystems can provide valuable insights into how technological designs and production processes can be optimized to care for the environment.
Here at Dassault Systèmes, we are steadfast in pursuing our corporate purpose: to harmonize product, nature and life. We are focused on helping our customers achieve sustainable innovations that have a positive impact on our world. We are proud that our 3DEXPERIENCE platform and its portfolio of solutions are helping people and companies of all sizes, all around the globe to create green projects and, whenever possible, apply biomimicry practices.
We recently filmed a video at the Paris Aquarium with two organizations that use our solutions to harness the power of biomimicry to bring their ideas to life. They spoke about how they found inspiration for their ideas in nature and the steps they’ve embarked on to bring their creations into the world.
EEL Energy
Green Turtle
The second featured project is very impressive for a different reason: it resulted from a team of students that participated in our annual Project of the Year contest organized by 3DEXPERIENCE Edu. Green Turtle is a robot designed like – you guessed it – a turtle that can track and clean the over eight million tons of plastics and other types of garbage that pollute the ocean. Founder Baptise Jajoury explains that they selected to emulate turtles for two reasons: they’re able to swim statically, which is an ideal quality for a product that tracks objects in the water such as floating debris; and because turtles are one of the few marine animals that rigid bodies, which is easier to replicate in a mechanical structure and are ideal for holding collected garbage.
Here is their original pitch video:
Inspired by the Ocean
We hope you’ll watch the video below, Inspired by the Ocean, to get much greater detail on – and be inspired by – both projects and the role that biomimicry can play in encouraging systemic environmental change. Dassault Systèmes Chief Sustainability Officer, Alice Steenland, joined Sylvain and Jagoury to discuss the importance of looking to nature to meet the challenges faceing planet Earth.
They share stories about purpose-driven entrepreneurs: people who are not only looking to invest in, but work for, companies that are doing tangible work to make positive contributions to the sustainability movement. They also explore how Gen Z is often opting for jobs where they can make the biggest impact given their generation’s belief that they have no choice but to jump in and do the work needed to save the planet. They also shared how rewarding it is to get out and show off their projects, as that often inspires others who in turn to look to nature to help find novel approaches to improve our world.
The Only Progress is Human
Through a two-year initiative, Dassault Systèmes is shedding light on 10 major challenges humanity is facing, inviting the world to discover how innovation plays a key role in addressing them. One of our challenges is Water & Consumption, and the projects from EEL Energy and Green Turtle are ideal examples of how designing products the virtual world can help us improve the real one. Because the virtual world allows us to simulate and evaluate the impact of our actions before making them real, innovators like these can create with people and the environment in mind from the very start.
Discover more about The Only Progress is Human
