FIELD TRIP: My Hero: Lessons in Science and Design from the California Shoreline
Agate Beach County Park, Bolinas, California
The shoreline offers a unique environment to observe a wide array of fantastic creatures within a relatively small and accessible area. These creatures are severely challenged by local conditions. The strategies they have evolved to surmount these challenges offer some great lessons for design, innovation, and problem solving. Participants will be provided with animal and plant identification sheets and some shared collecting and observing devices. Discussion will include: What makes a place? How are these two ecosystems different, and why? What forces are at work here? How have some of these organisms solved functional contradictions created by these conditions? How might we employ some of these lessons in design?
This field exercise is a regular part of my industrial design studio course, BioWerks, at the California College of the Arts. Typically, I follow up this field trip with an exercise called My Hero, where students choose a creature from either ecosystem, research it, and then design an application inspired by a form, process, or system related to the organism. Depending on available time, this part will be incorporated into the field experience with the aid of some informational handouts and materials provided for an al fresco charette.
Adjunct Professor, Industrial Design
California College of the Arts
Tom McKeag is the Program Director of the Berkeley Center for Green Chemistry at UC Berkeley and co-teaches the Greener Solutions course. He is an adjunct professor in the Industrial Design department at California College of the Arts (CCA), where he teaches the BioWerks investigative studio, and is the co-founder and editor of Zygote Quarterly, a digital magazine devoted to the nexus of science and design as they meet in bio-inspired design. He writes the monthly Biomimcry column for Greenbiz.
