I think that the great potential in biomimicry is to bring human experience into a more harmonious existence with the rest of the biological world. Therefore I prefer examples of biomimicry that draw solutions from the natural world and try to emulate them in design and manufacturing. I am not a fan  of biomimicry that is could be better termed “bio-masking” — an attempt to make a mechanism appear alive when it is not by mimicking life.

Biomimicry I Hate:

Canard Digérateur

The Canard Digerateur (Digesting Duck) is a mechanical automata created by Jacques de Vaucanson in 1739. It flaps, squawks  eats, and shits like a duck. It was created in a time when science was as we understand it now was just being invented and representations of the body as a machine with discrete components that we could undersand like the mechanisms in a clock were preeminent. Cartesian Dualism — the idea that the mind and the body are separate entities — and the assumed nod towards the domination of nature as just another machine granted by its philosophy continue to undergird human industry and its relationship with other life on earth.

As a piece of biomimetic design, I see it as taking a backwards approach. It seeks to simulate life whole-hog rather than treating life as a source from which to draw inspiration. And it is a good reminder of the danger of this approach — biomimetic design should never be the equivalent of designing a machine that can shit convincingly.

Biomimicry I love:

Sharklet

Sharklet Technologies creates surfaces that mimic the nano-scale pattern slow moving sharks evolved to prevent micro-organisms from colonizing their skin. The tiny bars arranged as diamonds makes it too energy intensive for micro-organisms — everything from e. coli in hospitals to green algae on submarines — to form a critical mass and establish a colony, meaning they either leave or die without beginning to reproduce en mass.