Continue your
Biomimicry Nature Journal
with a Brain Boost!

We would like to offer you and your family more tools and resources to find hope and connection through nature-inspired activities.

We will offer a series of reflections, activities, or resources tailored to further your reconnection with nature. They will come in the form of quotes, videos, podcasts, educational resources, iSites, AskNature strategy pages, and more. For each resource, you’ll be able to do an activity or reflect on the material provided in your Biomimicry Nature Journal.

Sketch your ideas, create storylines, take pictures or videos, and get creative with your journal entries. The prompt will not be as detailed as the 30 Days of Reconnection, but each resource will provide you with ways to take action so it’s an opportunity to let your creativity run wild.

Please continue to send us your journal entries on social media with hashtag #mybiomimicryjournal (tag us on Facebook and Instagram) and [email protected] so we can help share your inspiration with the community!

*We will continue these monthly prompts through December 2020. 

For our final Brain Boost series, we’re going to go back to the basics. In order to practice biomimicry, it’s important to first understand what is happening in a natural setting and how organisms function in their environment and in relation to one another.

Let’s dive in! Grab your Biomimicry Nature Journal, open up your creative mind, and join us for our last three days of activities for 2020!

Wednesday, December 9 Tune Into Your Surroundings

Find a place to sit and observe. This could be in your backyard, in a local park, or if it’s safer to stay inside (or a bit too chilly to venture outside), find a dream destination on Explore.org.

Sit for 15 minutes and observe. Notice what you see. When you spot an organism that sparks your curiosity, study it closely. What is an action that this organism is doing? How does it interact with its environment?

Refer to the Biomimicry Taxonomy. Can you find a way to describe this action as a function using one of these classification groups? You may consider a challenge the organism needs to solve in order to survive.

After reflecting in your Biomimicry Nature Journal, join us again for the next activity to continue this exploration.

Wednesday, December 10 Notice the Way

Function is an essential underpinning of biomimicry and is one element that distinguishes biomimetic design from biophilic and biomorphic design. Instead of looking simply at the visual and aesthetic qualities of the biological world, biomimicry focuses on learning from how living things meet specific functions.

Today we’re going to continue our journey in understanding how nature operates by looking at the functional observation you noted in the first activity to understand the way this organism is doing it. This is the strategy.

A biological strategy is a characteristic, mechanism, or process that performs a function for an organism. It’s an adaptation the organism has in order to survive. We get even more granular in the next activity to understand the distinct mechanism for how this strategy works.

Watch this short video from Madden Science to better acquaint yourself with function, mechanism, and strategy. As you watch the video, try to extract the function you observed yesterday and the way the organism is performing the strategy behind this action.

Thursday, December 11  Bringing it all Together

Now that you have an understanding of why the organism is performing a certain function you observed, it’s time to get deeper into how it is doing this through the mechanism. 

For example, one purpose of polar bear fur is to keep the polar bear warm. Stated in a more technical way, the function of the bear’s fur is to insulate or to conserve heat.

So, the polar bear’s fur is a strategy for insulation, but, more specifically, the characteristics of the polar bear’s fur are what make it especially good insulation (this is understanding the mechanism by which it insulates - i.e. the property of the layers of fur, size of hair, spacing, etc.). Studying how polar bear fur works could lead to the development of better insulation for human needs, such as outerwear, buildings, or other applications.

You can perform research online or see if there’s insight on AskNature.org to better understand your biological inspiration. Sketch and journal about your findings. What surprised you? How could this adaptation inspire a solution to a design challenge?

Have an idea for an activity or resource? Send us your recommendation to [email protected].

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Support the Next Generation
of Nature-Inspired Innovators

Imagine a world where everything we make is inspired by the natural world. By supporting the Biomimicry Institute you:

  • Help bring biomimicry education to more students and educators
  • Accelerate the growth of more nature-inspired startups and entrepreneurs
  • Increase the number of biological strategies and resources on AskNature.org and across our entire organization.

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