WORKSHOP: Biomimicry in the Bay Area

 

How can we look to nature to address some of the pressing issues our world faces today? Using the Bay Area as field lab, Lara Hoad will lead a group going out into the field on a journey of discovery and exploration as they undertake some of the exercises that she and her colleagues do with students in their class Science and Sustainable Design at Otis College of Art and Design. The group will immerse themselves in the unique ecosystem of the Bay Area and start to think about how to solve simple design challenges using biomimicry (nature-inspired design) using such exercises as Creature Feature and When Hairdryer Met Salamander. 

After a broader group experience, participants will break up into smaller groups and develop a biomimetic solution to a simple given design challenge using what they learned in the field, which they will then present to the larger group for discussion. “Biomimicry is an approach to innovation that seeks sustainable solutions to human challenges by emulating nature’s time-tested patterns and strategies. The goal is to create products, processes, and policies—new ways of living—that are well adapted to life on Earth over the long haul. The core idea is that nature has already solved many of the problems we are grappling with. Animals, plants, and microbes are the consummate engineers. After billions of years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what surrounds us is the secret to survival.” (from Biomimicry.org)

 

 

LARA HOAD

Senior Lecturer 

OTIS College of Art and Design

 

 

 

Architect and designer Lara Hoad is a graduate of London’s Royal College of Art. She has over twenty years of global experience practicing and teaching in Europe, Australia, and North and Central America and of having her own small practice. She oversees creative project direction at March Studio Branded Architecture and currently teaches at Otis College of Art and Design and at the School of Architecture at Woodbury University, Los Angeles. With biologist Sam Stier, Hoad has been teaching the class Science and Sustainable Design, a prerequisite for the minor in sustainability at Otis, since its inception in spring 2013. The class was innovative in that it brought together a designer and scientist to educate the students in the intersection of the two disciplines and particularly in the practice of biomimicry, or nature-inspired design.