Life Science

Jonni Bidwell, long suspected of being a robot, hears from  Claire Janisch about the secrets and genius of nature.

- Claire Janisch

Claire Janisch is a Biomimicry Professional and co-founder of the Biomimicry for Africa Foundation. Her work involves taking inspiration from nature to solve complex problems, from engineering to material science to software development. Whether it’s buildings inspired by termite mounds or next-generation materials based on spider silk, nature offers all kinds of creative solutions to the world’s exigencies. By studying key principles of life, such as modularity, information exchange, and self-organization, Claire helps people around the world find new and innovative approaches. Open source, it turns out, already embodies these principles, as we found out when we met her at O’Reilly’s Velocity conference in October 2018, at which she was a keynote speaker.

Linux format: For some reason, when I think of mimicking nature, the first thing that comes to mind is humans’ early attempts at flight: running off the end of some structure, flapping some cumbersome wing-like attachments and invariably landing in the water a few meters from said structure… But biomimicry is something more subtle than that and has lots of different levels to it, right?

Claire Janisch: I think biomimicry’s been innate in human culture for a long time. Most indigenous cultures mimic nature in some way, whether it’s the Inuit building igloos like a polar bear, or in [her native] South Africa, there’s a culture that builds these beehive-like structures. It’s been in our history for a long time, but since the industrial revolution and thereafter we’ve deliberately designed ourselves as separate from nature and more or less forgotten about it.