My four-credit class for the fall semester is Product Design and I chose to enroll in a Biomimicry specific course. Our first project has been very research intensive so far, but I've done a little sketching that I can share. The project we were assigned is about either heat or cold conservation and I was originally planning to apply it to winter survival shelters. In an effort to scale down my project I'm beginning to design some sort of fresh water storage system that melts and filters snow.
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Biomimicry is an emerging discipline that studies nature's best ideas and then imitates these designs and processes to solve human problems" - Biomimicry Guild. I've already done quite a bit of research on some of Earth's best cold weather species and am currently in the process of studying Caribou fur as well as the petal patterns of certain tundra flowers. Here are some of the early sketches I did when I was still focused on the shelter problem:
