Since 2011 I have co-taught traveling studios with ASU faculty in biomimicry, design and architecture. We’ve crisscrossed the globe with our students, traveling from Panama to Hawaii, Switzerland to the Galapagos. In this essay, read about one of our extraordinary learning adventures: a collaboration with the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama.
Biomimicry Traveling Studios
Their nightly return to town is as sudden and raucous as New Yorkers spilling out of Yankee Stadium after a World Series win. Come morning, the sun rousts the birds from their perches, triggering a reverse commute equally grand and unruly.
For 12 days in September, the parrots served as both alarm clock and dinner bell for the faculty and students in our Arizona State University class. We were part of a traveling studio in biomimicry which included graduate students in design and biology. Our challenge: Collaborate with our project partner, the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, to create bio-inspired architectural and product design concepts for a new field station on a remote peninsula in the canal zone.
The standing joke in Gamboa is that this sleepy hamlet on the Panama Canal hosts more parrots than people. Spend just one night here, and you’ll find that Gamboans neither exaggerate nor jest. Each day at sunset, parrots stream from the dense jungle of neighboring Soberenía National Park. They straggle into town, two by two, to roost in great flocks in the spreading crowns of jacaranda, mayo and suicide trees. More than 700—mostly Red-lored Amazons, a lime-green, foot-long parrot marked by a scarlet blaze on its forehead—have been counted in a single census.
Planning field trips to study plants, birds and insects up close is a logistical nightmare. So looking to nature typically entails peering at organisms on a computer screen, consulting with a professional biologist and then carrying out additional research in scientific journals.
But in Panama, far from the distractions of daily life back home, we were free to spend hour after uninterrupted hour outside. The temporary furlough allowed us to strap on backpacks and pace the tropical forest for days on end. And if that wasn’t enough, most nights after dinner, we’d dig out headlamps, slip on the day’s muddy boots and head out again to explore the forest’s edge, shining our lights on tree trunks and the undersides of rocks and leaves to greet the animals that showed up for the night shift. Or nature would just simply come to us, lured by the security light on the back porch of our dorm—Jurassic-sized moths, beetles and grasshoppers that left the students incredulous and gasping with delight.
This was not my first educational foray into biomimicry—an emerging discipline that looks to the forms, processes and systems of nature for inspiration in solving human problems. I have been working since 2008 with faculty in design and biology to help draft curricula that probes the natural world for sustainable innovation. But this course was different. During an ordinary semester on campus, a class in biomimicry is shoehorned into the students’ already jam-packed academic and work schedules.
