the synthesist
by kim tingley
“After 3.8 billion years of research and development, failures are fossils, and what surrounds us is the secret to survival,” wrote the biologist Janine Benyus in her seminal 1997 book, Biomimicry. Benyus thinks fractals can help us solve a diverse array of design challenges. For one thing, “fractals really increase surface area,” she says. Picture a simple hexagon. Then picture a hexagonal snowflake crystal, within its form a baroque system of ridges that greatly complicates the basic shape without causing it to expand beyond its original boundaries. Cell phone makers, playing off this idea, have already figured out new ways of maximizing signal reception by bending antennas into fractal shapes, adding length without increasing the amount of space they take up. Acousticians and concert-hall architects already know that when sound hits a smooth, flat wall, it bounces off and echoes. A wall with a rough surface, on the other hand—one that mimics the fractally textured surface of, say, a bark-covered tree—does a much better job of absorbing sound. Trees are like fractal idea factories: Benyus sees in them a template for highly efficient water distribution, for example. “Start with one diameter” (i.e., the trunk), she says. “Branch it, drop down to a smaller diameter, then branch it again.” This pattern, which repeatedly finds expression in a tree’s branches, its stems, and the delicate veins of its individual leaves, allows water to flow freely over a maximum amount of surface area. “Nothing in our plumbing systems looks anything like that,” she says, noting that our pipes “are always taking 90-degree angles. That’s why we have big pumps that require lots of energy.” It turns out that strategically embedding fractal shapes into almost anything helps make that thing stronger. Physicists have made concrete more durable and impermeable by using fractals to engineer its lassical geometry is smooth and ingredients. Researchers at Harvard University’s Wyss Institute for regular: straight lines, right angles, perfect circles. Man-made objects, from skyscrapers to iPhones, Biologically Inspired Engineering recently created a biodegradable alternative to plastic known as shrilk, which owes some of its excepconform to its rules, but almost nothing in nature does. Nature is messy, craggy, and chaotic—or so it tional strength to the inspiration for its engineering: the fractal layers seemed until 1975, the year a maverick mathemati- of an insect’s cuticle. “[Many of] the structural properties found in cian, Benoît Mandelbrot, invented the term fractals nature are not just chemistry,” Donald Ingber, the institute’s director, to describe patterns he had discerned within seemingly irregular told the Harvard Gazette. “They’re architecture.” Finding inspiration in nature isn’t new, of course. But actively queryshapes found in nature. Mandelbrot showed that natural phenomena ing nature about its best practices is. The trickiest part of biomimicry is like clouds, mountains, broccoli, human lungs, and (yes) even galaxies in knowing not only what to copy, but also when and where. If we really are, despite their random appearance, highly organized, their larger forms composed of miniature replicas of those same forms. And those hope to collaborate with nature on new building and design projects, we’ll need to rethink our role within it. We’ll have to make replicas themselves contain even smaller replicas. At sure we’re balancing our needs with the needs of our the most fundamental level, he showed that each foot For more on the intersection of larger ecosystem, which—while it may look messy—is of coastline has the same basic jagged texture and science, culture, and the environactually made up of countless interconnected systems shape as a mile of it does, or as 100 miles do. ment, visit onearth.org/scitech that, fractal-like, mirror the whole. Mandelbrot’s revelation presented a new way of Fractals invite us to admire nature for its beauty and functionality— perceiving nature, not as something disordered and chance-governed to get outside, hunt for these mysteriously repeating forms, and then but as something intricately engineered. The resultant field of fractal geometry provides us with a way of defining and measuring these mys- try to figure out what their purpose might be. “The nature of fractals is meant to be gradually discovered by the reader,” Mandelbrot wrote, terious forms and—when it’s applied to the field of biomimicry—re“not revealed in a flash by the author.” It takes practice, patience, and imcreating them. And our newfound ability to copy nature’s fundamental mersion to start seeing them. But once you do, they’re everywhere. designs raises an obvious question: Why don’t we do so more often? This question is at the heart of biomimicry, which seeks to appropriate nature’s most successful designs in order to create more Kim Tingley, a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine, writes the efficient and sustainable cities, buildings, and consumer products. Working Hypothesis column for onearth.org.
design for living
C 2 4 onearth
winter 2013/2014
illustration by jesse lefkowitz
.org