Imagine the design insights from 3.8 billion years of evolution being available on demand, for free, to any innovator in the world at the moment they are creating new technologies.

It’s the next best thing to being outside.

Practitioners of biomimicry design have one consistent complaint – they lack access to relevant biological information organized by design and engineering function. Innovators working on desalination, for instance, can’t learn about how nature filters—mangrove roots, kidneys, and sea bird salt glands—all in one place. There is no catalogue of nature’s solutions to design and engineering challenges.

We’re trying to remedy this by creating a digital library of nature’s solutions organized by function that is both a cross-pollinating tool and a collaboration forum.

The Biomimicry Design Portal is a bio-inspiration website where innovators can learn from nature’s solutions, biologists can find a whole new audience for their research, and collaborators can work together to create sustainable, bio-inspired designs. It’s amazing what can happen when you build a Rosetta stone that translates knowledge from one world, biology, into the language of design and engineering. The genius flows.

Fully built out, the Biomimicry Design Portal will provide:

• Inspiration: Innovators can browse a catalogue of nature's solutions (organized by design challenge), publish their own design challenge classification schemes, and post questions for biologists
• Biology Know-How in Engineering Language: Biologists can share their knowledge of how life works (How does nature filter? Adhere? Reduce friction? Dissipate heat? Communicate, etc.) by uploading summary articles, visuals, End Note bibliographies, comments, etc.
• Open-Source Research: Industry can post design challenges and award "X prizes" for bio-inspired solutions
• Education: Students can take classes online and post their bio-inspired designs
• Collaboration: Innovators and biologists can meet, and bio-inspired breakthroughs can be born.

An early prototype of the portal, available for alpha testing, has been created the Biomimicry Guild and Rocky Mountain Institute. The Biomimicry Institute is interested in keeping this site in the public domain while taking it to the next level.

Visit Biomimicry Portal prototype