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Catherine Weetman talks to Richard James MacCowan, who helps people use biomimicry to design better materials, products, buildings, and cities.
Richard is the Founder and Creative Director of the Biomimicry Innovation Lab, with a mission to inspire and share how the natural world can deliver unique solutions by radically reducing the need for resources. Richard kindly wrote a brilliant piece on Biomimicry for the 2nd edition of Catherine’s Circular Economy Handbook.
We talk about different aspects of biomimicry and how it can inform the design of objects, systems and much more, including Structure and materials, Swarm behaviour, 3D Printing & termites, Self-repairing and ‘exotic’ materials – and why origami is useful! Richard explains how nature uses structure for colour, which leads me to ask whether some of these developments are actually encouraging consumption.
Podcast host Catherine Weetman helps businesses use circular, regenerative and fair solutions to do better, with less.
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Read on for more on our guest and links to the people, organisations and other resources we mention.
Links we mention in the episode:
- A Circular Economy Handbook: How to Build a More Resilient, Competitive and Sustainable Business
- Biomimicry Innovation Lab https://biomimicryinnovationlab.com/
- Social Media – @biomimicryUK
- https://biologydictionary.net/biomimicry/ with a few examples and quick quiz
- More about the Logoplaste plastic bottle https://www.logoplaste.com/media/2282/logoplaste_case_study_vitalis_2018.pdf
- 3D printing and termites Termites and 3D printing https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1LbWgePCgo&t=123s
- https://biomimicry.org/zygote-quarterly/
- Dr Rupert Soar at Nottingham Trent University https://www.ntu.ac.uk/staff-profiles/architecture-design-built-environment/rupert-c-soar
- Zygote Quarterly journal https://zqjournal.org/
- Professor Peter Head of Resilience Brokers https://resiliencebrokers.org/ and https://www.pivotprojects.org
- Book: Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer https://milkweed.org/book/braiding-sweetgrass
About Richard James MacCowan
Richard is the Founder of Biomimicry Innovation Lab focusing on the food, manufacturing and built environment sectors. He is the co-founder of the non-profit Biomimicry UK and CEO of Smart Stable Limited, an equine technology startup. Alongside this, Richard is a visiting lecturer at several universities around the world. He combines this with extensive research development with international collaborators via the Design Society and the ISO Standards in Biomimetics.
Richard loves to explore fresh ideas and concepts and is ever curious about the environment around him. He is an award-winning designer and has worked around the world in cities, manufacturing, food systems and product design.
Richard’s passion is developing new models of innovation to reduce costs, improve efficiency and resilience in the design and manufacturing process. He taught at some of the top design schools in the world: from The Royal College of Art (UK); The Pratt Institute (USA); Vellore Institute of Technology (India); and the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (Hungary).
If you’re new to the circular economy, you might like the ‘getting started’ playlist. There’s also an interactive podcast index, making it easy to find episodes on each of the key circular economy strategies or for a specific market sector. And to dig deeper, please check out Catherine’s award-winning A Circular Economy Handbook, published by Kogan Page.
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