without thought

Water off a…

I’ve just started looking into the growing field of Biomimetics and I find it fascinating but one of those things that appears to be so straight forward you find yourself thinking ‘why on earth hadn’t this been looked at before?’. In many ways it fits in the ethos of Naoto Fukasawa (who’s design ideology this blog takes its name from). Nature may have all of the answers. Why deny millions of years of evolution? One of the programs on BBC’s ‘In Business’ looks at this growing trend in nano technology, interviewing ‘Advanced Technology Leader’ Margaret Blohm at General Electrics. Blohm sites the origins in this field having come from what’s called the ‘Lotus Effect’; discovered by Professor Wilhelm Barthlott, the director of the Nees-Institue for Biodiversity in Bonn, Germany. The Lotus Flower is self cleaning and what companies like GE are keen to learn from this is how they can improve on their existing materials by mimicking this effect, producing something which is described as being ’superhydrophobic’. GE, according to Blohm, have even managed to adapt this technology further applying it to metals. This has distinct advantages in areas where cleaning is either an ongoing issue or costly. Very interesting to see what everyday object this creeps into but if Nokia are anything to go by it’s set to inflict the mundane.