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How to Discover Nature's Strategies
In this Section, you will explore nature for help with your Design Challenge. We have provided three different methods that will be helpful to find good solutions.
What are Natural Strategies?
Think back to your Research Questions. You will now use them to search for solutions in nature.
For example, maybe your Function is 'move liquids' and your Research Question is 'How does nature move liquids?'
You can then ask ourselves, what in the natural world moves liquids?
Some possible ideas might include how trees move liquids from their roots to the leaves, how mammals move blood through their veins, how sponges filter-feed on the sea floor, or how hair wicks moisture away from the skin. You can now explore these possibilities in more detail - how do they move liquids and what can I learn from this for my Design Challenge?
What do I need to do?
Once you have identified an example in nature, you need to think about how it works. What is the Strategy the organism uses to perform the Function? This is critical because biomimicry uses the Strategy to solve your human challenge. You can find some examples below.
Strategy is how the Function is achieved and the detailed mechanism of how the Function works. For example, think of honeybees trying to keep a stable temperature in their hive (function = to regulate temperature).
The Strategy they use to achieve this is to remove or generate heat to maintain a stable temperature range. We can add more detail about how this works: bees beat their wings to fan air out of the hive when they perceive the temperature to be too high, and cluster together to generate heat when they perceive the temperature is too low.
Some Other Examples
Learn how spiders are providing solutions to make fashion sustainable …
Learn how building insulation is being created from mycelium ...
Learn how butterflies are helping to tackle air pollution …