2023-05-22 07:06:00
Birds are the pinnacle of ingenuity for industrial designer Annemarit van Broekhoven. Her book ‘The Bionic Bird’ is an ode to nature as the ultimate designer. ‘Learning from nature helps not to be paralyzed.’
We humans think we can do a lot, but in many cases we just mess around. Summarized a bit irreverently, that was the conclusion that industrial designer Annemarit van Broekhoven drew soon after her studies in Delft. “Just think about it”, she says, “we often use an exorbitant amount of energy to produce plastics and we also throw away an awful lot of raw materials”.
“We make furniture that seems very practical. Until you have taken them apart once or twice and put them back together when moving house. Then there is hardly any sustainability.” There must be another way, the designer thought. “My eyes opened when I took a closer look at nature.”
At a tall oak tree, for example. “It’s very easy to see only tens of cubic meters of beautiful furniture wood in there. But if you look again, you see a very efficient pump that pumps water up from the roots in the ground to the leaves tens of meters high. And in those leaves you see beautiful solar panels that convert light into energy for the tree.”
Mimicking the cleverness of nature
When Van Broekhoven realized this, she plunged into biomimicry with full dedication: imitating nature’s cleverness in technology and human processes. This week she brings together part of that knowledge in the educational book The bionic birdwhich she made together with illustrator Margot Westermann.
More energy from smarter rotor
An albatross has extremely long and narrow wings: very useful for sailing on the wind above the oceans, but difficult to ‘flap’ with the bird when it wants to take off. And neither does the albatross, noted Albatrozz, a young company working on innovative technology to increase the efficiency of wind turbines. When an albatross takes off, the bird very subtly wiggles its wing to grab the optimal airflow. Albatrozz now also applies this wobbling in patented rotor blades for wind turbines. The claim: twice as much force on the blades at low wind speeds and therefore more energy for the turbine.
People over the age of 50 may think of the term ‘bionic’ The six million dollar man, the children’s television series, about a man who, after an accident, gets bionic implants in his eye, arm and both legs, which gives him superhuman powers. “That superhuman is indeed what the term ‘bionic’ evokes”, Van Broekhoven agrees.
“We can learn a lot of clever things from nature, from extremely strong structures in the bones of birds or the threads of a spider’s web, to the eggs of an ostrich. Did you know that as an adult you can just stand on top of that, without breaking that egg? But that an ostrich chick needs one small egg tooth to break that strong egg from the inside?”
Ecological footprint
“But ‘bionic’ means more to me than just clever techniques,” the writer emphasizes. “It is also about a way of working and thinking behind all that technology. Your carbon footprint becomes so much lower when you do things in a more natural way. Waste of raw materials has really become a human trait. You will never see birds do that on such a scale.”
Quiet ‘springs’ on the aircraft engine
Birds have many different versions of feathers. From large, hard feathers to generate power when flying to miniscule, tangled down feathers for optimal thermal insulation. Owls have adapted feathers so as not to be heard by the mouse they hunt. The subtle hooks on their feathers for that reason were copied by aircraft manufacturers. The serrations on the trailing edge of jet engines make the engines quieter and reduce the need for hull sound insulation. As a result, the aircraft become a little lighter and the fuel consumption is therefore also a fraction less.
It is by no means the author’s intention to romanticize nature. After all, evolution is also about the survival of the best adapted individuals, while many others simply perish. But in that continuous fight for survival, she praises nature’s adaptability.
“Take a bird like the knot. It was built as a carnivore, but if there are too few shellfish in its wintering area in West Africa, the knot switches to a vegetarian diet of seagrass root nodules. The carnivorous birds clearly perform less well on that plant food, but it’s that adaptability that matters to me; that they are flexible enough to make do with what is available in nature.”
Is the skin on an egg also a good plaster?
When peeling an egg you always come across it: that skin, just under the shell, that sometimes makes peeling a lot more difficult. But industrial designer Van Broekhoven is full of praise for that sheet. “It’s breathable, it’s stretchy, it resists bacteria and it’s biodegradable; all great features for a new plaster!” The biotech company Eggxpert is already looking into whether that skin can also be used as a raw material for a ‘bionic plaster’ in the future. They only have to collect the skins from a cake factory or another large consumer of eggs.
One large organism in the air
According to Van Broekhoven, a bionic bird is also very good at working together. “You learn that when you study flocks of birds. They can move through the air as one large organism, without major collisions taking place. And all this without a conductor or leader flying over to tell you how to do it. Swarming birds only need to keep an eye on the birds in their immediate vicinity in order not to let the organization run into the soup.
“That swarm intelligence is already a source of inspiration for organizational psychology; how we can work better together in self-managing teams, without bureaucracy or a boss telling everyone what to do.”
Van Broekhoven’s book is written and formatted like a children’s book, but the author finds that the theme also resonates with adults, ‘a bit like the television program The core’.
However, it mainly focuses on young people. “We live in a time of climate crisis, war, environmental pollution… As a young person, you can easily be paralyzed by all that misery. I try to counter that with this book; to empower young people by making them look at nature with different eyes. Because the solutions are often within reach.”
Tailgating a Boeing?
It’s still great to see geese or cranes flying in a long V-formation. Cyclists know better than anyone why they do that: your predecessor keeps you out of the wind and by using the vortices of that same predecessor, it may even ‘pull’ you forward. Such a V formation would be risky with aircraft and produce mixed results at best. The laws of biomechanics dictate that the advantage only occurs at carefully measured distances and that the risks in the form of turbulence would be too great at a slightly too short or long distance. Not everything that benefits a bird can therefore simply be copied.
Read also:
Bacteria, bees and blood: Design with nature’s technique
Man can put nature to work for himself without destroying it. How, that is what the Design by Nature exhibition shows.
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