I Just Don’t Understand Mother Nature: What Design Thinkers Can Learn From Her

Many years ago when the d.Studio was just a twinkle in Moura’s eye, I watched a TED Talk on the best design thinker that humanity has ever seen. That design thinker was Mother Nature.

Janine Benyus, a Biologist working on asknature.org, has made it her life’s work to understand, catalogue and spread the design miracles that the creatures on this Earth have been tinkering away at for the last 3.8 Billion years. She notes that we are not the first to try and collect water, work in groups, or make shelters. So why should we assume we are the best at it. Janine’s field of biomimicry opens an exciting new field for the study of design and applications humans can use to improve our world.

What I found very relevant while designing social systems was the design of social insect colonies. These ants and bees come together to create amazing feats of nature with respect to their relative sizes.

In essence, we believe that social insects have been so successful–they are almost everywhere in the ecosphere–because of three characteristics:

• flexibility (the colony can adapt to a changing environment);

• robustness (even when one or more individuals fail, the group can still perform its tasks); and

• self-organization (activities are neither centrally controlled nor locally supervised).

Self-organization is the most interesting out of the three. Swarm intelligence offers a unique way to design social processes, where you can break down the various needs of the group to various players. These players output necessary actions independent of other players and of their own accord due to personal incentives. This allows for a robust and flexible community where complex group actions manifest through many individual independent group behaviours.