Janine Benyus Quotes

First, I identify an analogous problem in nature and borrow from it.

What we're looking at is God's design, nature's template, and using that as a pattern to cut around and lay it down on a domestic model to duplicate that pattern that we see in nature.

Leopard is an animal design, and my designs come from nature.

There are three types of biomimicry - one is copying form and shape, another is copying a process, like photosynthesis in a leaf, and the third is mimicking at an ecosystem's level, like building a nature-inspired city.

I think of what I do as copying nature's design process.

What if, every time I started to invent something, I asked, 'How would nature solve this?'

Design can never be an ultimate explanation for anything. It can only be a proximate explanation. A plane or a car is explained by a designer but that's because the designer himself, the engineer, is explained by natural selection.

Per capita, I would say that Australia has more biomimetic projects going than many other countries I've been to.

So if I want to buy a light in a shop and I don't find a light that I like, I think to myself what would I like? What would I like to buy? Then I started to imagine and design it for myself a lot of the time.

Everyone is trying to jump on the biomimic bandwagon. But a cork floor is not biomimicry. Neither is using bacteria to clean water.

Are our problems moving faster than our ability to solve them?

I'm not a mother of children, but I'm a different type of mother where my approach to design is more in line with nature. It's less about dictating and more about editing and listening and allowing something to grow. So I nourish and let the material express what it wants to be.

In nature, there is no separation between design, engineering, and fabrication; the bone does it all.

In the end, it's clear that the incorporation of synthetic biology in product and architectural design will enable the transition from designs that are inspired by nature to designs made with and by nature to, possibly, designing nature herself.

I copy the dress of an animal because I love to copy God. I think God is the most fantastic designer.

Jay Harman is the quintessential biomimic, a principled inventor who sees solutions everywhere he looks in the natural world. And he looks deeply, with the soul of a student. He moves with grace from a world of waving sea kelp to the world of sustainable design, bringing nature's wisdom into the board rooms of global companies, to the design tables of the engineers and designers who make our world. This is more than a business book, more than a memoir, more than a new way to solve global challenges. It's a book about a new way to think.

We may need to solve problems not by removing the cause but by designing the way forward even if the cause remains in place.

Inventive man has invented nothing -- nothing from scratch. If he has produced a machine that in motion overcomes the law of gravity, he learned the essentials from the observation of birds.

At this point in our global ecological crisis, the survival of humanity will require a fundamental shift in our attitude toward nature: from finding out how we can dominate and manipulate nature to how we can learn from her. In this brilliant and hopeful book, Jay Harman shows us how far the new field of Biomimicry has already progressed toward this goal. The Shark's Paintbrush makes for fascinating and joyful reading - much needed in these dark times.

I follow in building the principles which nature has used in its domain.

The boundaries of design are the same as the problem of perception.

I make all my decisions on intuition. But then, I must know why I made that decision. I throw a spear into the darkness. That is intuition. Then I must send an army into the darkness to find the spear. That is intellect.

The content could be done anyplace, but the real invention is the architecture. The architecture is the only work that really defines a new way of doing things. I think this point is fundamental.

I always had some kind of creative side and technical side, and I thought architecture might be the way to combine them, so I went to architecture school in New York.