Biomimicry Workshop at Northeastern College

Northeastern College’s Environmental Club, Citizens of a Respected Earth (CORE) invited me back  to workshop and build on their first biomimicry session. This time the students updated me on the fact that their club was now the most popular club in the school, with over fifty members as opposed to about twenty previously. Some of them helped to facilitate the workshop for those who were new to emulating nature’s genius!

This time we decided to try something different, moving into brainstorming and generating ideas to see how far we could take what they’d learned in a short space of time. To this end we workshopped with a biomimicry card game designed by circular design agency Wiithaa. The BiomimiCards proved a fun way to reinforce information about the strategies of key biological champions, bringing the lesson to life. 

The students were divided into teams, with each team addressing a particular challenge on the theme or element within the cards that was relevant to their everyday lives. For example, the “Water” team chose to address flood borne diseases and viruses and this was recently an issue due to heavy flooding in the past couple of months. They developed solutions for this based on one or more of the biological champions represented by the cards; in this instance they drew inspiration from sharkskin, which has antiviral capacities. 

Flooding in Trinidad, 2017

A BiomimiCard about the unique properties of sharkskin.