Natural Design: An Introduction

Last week, I got a wonderful oppurtunity to listen and interact with Prof. Dhimant Panchal, a thought leader and a known personality in field of product design and design education.

Theme of the seminar was "Designing in sync. with nature". He beautifully described how designing inspired by nature is important, easy and benificial, socially as well as economically. There were several examples presented by him, diciphering various natural acts which we fail to observe and appreciate in our daily life and how we can implement those natural phenomena in our day today work and activity. The best thing about natural designing and conceptualization is that they are always sustainable and scalable. Here is an example.

I tried to jot down few points which i feel can help you in designing naturally.

 Observe:

            Spend time

            Look at surface/textures/colors/forms/shapes

            Expression of natural form, physical and non-physical

            Seasonal metamorphosis, change/ growth

            Connect between animal and vegetable world

Be Curious:

            Discover patterns in nature

            Reason out observation

            Find rationale
            Investigate your observation in your own way; you are part of the Nature

            Apply connect the dots technique to appreciate larger picture

Categorize and Classify:

            Animal worlds / plant / insect / micro bacterial / marine

Connect the seemingly unconnected:

            Establish connection

            Nothing in nature exists in isolation

            Inter-dependency

            Discover synergetic co-relation

Touch / see / hear / taste Nature:

            Do not just use one sensory receptor

            Experience through other senses also

            Try and see what can't actually be seen

            #there are very few adjectives for smell - why?

Apply un-conventional logic:

           Feel free to be unique and think what seems to be stupid at first
           There is no specific rule to understand nature

Though the session was more to do with product design, I am sure your aspiration to design a awesome software or a complex business solution for a client can very well find sense in natural happenings and the ideas it has to offer. 
Feel free to share your thoughts / ideas or projects.
Cheers,
Abhinav

  
Desclaimer: All pictures and products used for illustration are copyright of their respective owners.