Bio-inspired Engineering
Though the paradigm of the living may disrupt our vision of the world and our place in it, it also provides a source of inspiration for our ways of designing. Donald Ingber, the Director of the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard, explains that our knowledge of the living has become such that we are now capable of developing innovations in engineering that take their inspiration from biological principles. With the goal of exploring the future of bio-engineering, the Institute was designed around a group of researchers from diverse disciplines, but also actors from the world of business, with the aim of mixing approaches and methods. Starting from the general principles of the living so as to apply them to problem-solving according to the principles of engineering, this work is more bio-inspiration than biomimicry. For architecture, it is a matter of taking inspiration from the way that nature builds in a hierarchical fashion, according to the open and metabolic processes of evolution through self-organization.
