Creative Cape Town

There’s an almost antique episode of MacGyver where the handsome handyman-cum-hero rides to the rescue (again) in the knick of time (again) by breaking an egg over a hole in a radiatorfor the first time! In TV history, that is. Not exactly plausible, but a simple idea that   – er – stuck with me.

So, too, did the little anecdote of the bumble bee. His wingspan, it is said, can’t actually support his weight, but he doesn’t know, so he flies anyway. Endearing, if anything, but not nearly what we need to solve emerging design and engineering issues creatively in the fourth world.

Yet liberated logic like this forms a fundamental part of a methodology called Biomimicry that is helping solve our complex design challenges. How is doing a Doctor Dolittle on ordinary physics getting real time results? By marrying the power of science and imagination through collaboration.

Last year, 4 academics from 3 departments at a large South African tertiary educational institution went to a workshop on Biomimicry. They were senior lecturers from CPUT’s Faculty of Informatics and Design and they were inspired by a methodology of mimicry, interconnectedness and pattern making. CPUT is the largest uni in the Western Cape, and the first to infiltrate traditional thinking with mould and slime, rolling excrement around and playing (dead, if the case calls for it). Come again?

Biomimicry: the examination of nature – its models, systems, processes, and elements – for emulation or inspiration towards solving human problems. The term Biomimicry and Biomimetics come from the Greek words bios, meaning life, and mimesis, meaning to imitate.

In some senses, Biomimicry may at first seem to be a quack subject based on, like, organic metaphor, man, but it’s much more than this. Sustainability is its status quo and as a discipline, it looks deeply into the systems of nature for wisdom and direction. So when we say slime, we’re very likely talking about the individual genetic components of slime, and the way it makes its way around the world (it does! Far more effectively than most of our metal birds and carpools).

The genius in the methodology comes in the application of its elements:

1. Isolate and interrogate a natural process
2. Apply it to a new (unrelated) context
3. Find the connections.

So, for example, when CPUT pioneered a five-week pilot module to a group of 70 mixed-major third- and fourth-year students in April 2011, the question of how to green the Fringe and humanise its concrete and tar stretches was planted, amongst other Fringe-related challenges.

Coming from different backgrounds, the students were thrown into creative confusion by design. The confusion became cohesion through a series of comprehensible solutions with surprising sources of inspiration.

The groups researched and identified ‘champions’, Biomimicry lingo for nature’s examples applied. One group rolled out the idea of a mobile bio ball– a durable container for organic waste produced in the area that can be moved around easily in a converted bicycle. Another idea saw vertical market gardens on the walls that both beautify the surrounds and supply residents, restaurants and others with fresh herbs and vegetables. Level walkways mounted on the sides of buildings were also suggested, to bring back a sense of the natural, variable rural landscape, and offer a different view without taking up space on the ground needed for parks, parking and perambulating traffic. Which would necessitate a ‘breathing’ bus stop, that answers all kinds of weather intelligently and intuitively (if inanimate objects can be intuitive, and it turns out they can). And guided routes for different kinds of pedestrians and vehicles. See the connection? What about the imitation?

The organic roller ball was based on the patterns and sensibilities of the dung beetle. The bus stop was based on the Southern Live Oak tree, whose stoma pores open and close for sun and rain respectively. The guided traffic and pedestrian routes called on the cuttle fish’s six types of visual signifiers that hide him from harm or show him off.

Once it’s explained, it’s a cinch; obvious almost. But it’s taken tens of thousands of years to bring this kind of thinking out of similar (but purposefully specific) practises like permaculture into the minds of tomorrow. Embracing the boundlessness of the imagination and the endless resourcefulness of an ever-adaptive natural environment doesn’t, surprisingly, always come naturally. We are trained, with the best intentions of our parents and superiors, systems and situations, to think in terms of finite environments and options, from limited resources to unpredictable world economies. The engineering of Imagineering that is Biomimicry requires a new approach to problem solving. Bruce Snaddon, senior lecturer in the Graphic Design Department at the Faculty of Informatics and Design, and champion of the implementation of a course that calls on its own champions in the university, explains that course facilitators try to “train students to be more critical of assumptions and to think holistically in terms of the impact which design might have.”  Developing a language of applied metaphors taps into an ancient memory we are all kin to, though some seem closer to this kind of thinking than others. If the ideas from the CPUT groups are anything to go by, though, the gospel of Biomimicry has taken root right away right here in Cape Town.

Exciting as it is for the future of design education, not everyone is going to become a wheel-reinventing innovator. That doesn’t marginalise this mode of creativity. Independent, original approaches are increasingly valuable in the professional world where contractors are on the rise and retirement annuities are dropping daily.  “We have to move towards a design discourse involving critical thinking to prepare students for a world of change, a world in flux,” is Snaddon’s wisdom. “The notion of a job waiting for a student is no longer the case. We need to train them to be more entrepreneurial.”

Founded on singular inspiration and collective execution, The Fringe hopes to be one of the first to provide a real playground for discovery and development through Biomimicry in the Southern Hemisphere.

With Biomimicry changing our intellectual and literal landscape, the heroes may be on TV, but the champions are all around us. Good thing, really; I don’t know many self-respecting students who’d sport that ‘do like ol’ Mac.…But hair, man, we could USE that stuff, think about it!

*

Photos Graeme Williams, source MediaClubSouthAfrica.com