Conclusion

Bio-inspiration, and biomimetics in particular, offers a unique opportunity to provide methods, guidelines and tools that draw on over 3.8 billion years of prior problem-solving through natural selection. In many areas, living organisms still greatly outperform our technological solutions. Biomimetic solutions are interesting not only for their ingenuity, but also for their potential for ecological resilience.

This article describes a general framework for understanding biomimetics. Coupled with this, a reading grid, presenting the various existing biomimetic tools, is proposed. This reading grid, by facilitating the selection of tools to reconstitute a detailed process, enables the transition from this methodological framework to a biomimetic "method". Each tool, regardless of its strengths and weaknesses, has a different scope. When defining your own process,...