Learning Session 11: Biomimicry - Learning from Nature
Online learning sessions using dialogue to explore the workings, developments, (im)possibilities, and emerging insights of diverse approaches and praxes for Co-creation with the More-than-Human world
🎧 Prefer listening? Open the link in the Substack app and tap Play, or paste it into e.g. Paper2Audio (a free text-to-speech player) to turn it into an audio version
The 11th learning session of the Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox in March 2026 explored Biomimicry - Learning from Nature with Amanda Sturgeon, CEO of the Biomimicry Institute, architect, and long-standing practitioner in regenerative design.
The session examined biomimicry not only as innovation inspired by nature, but as a practice that requires a shift in perception—from extracting ideas to developing the capacity to learn with living systems. Drawing on examples from architecture, cities, and systems thinking, the dialogue explored what it takes to translate ecological principles into human design, where this works, where it breaks down, and what this reveals about our current ability to co-create with the more-than-human world.
What follows is a synthesis of key questions, insights, and cross-cutting threads from the dialogue.
🌿 Learning Session 11 (March 2026) — Synthesis
Biomimicry - Learning from Nature, with Amanda Sturgeon (Biomimicry Institute)
What changes when learning from nature is not just a methodology, but a practice that reshapes how we understand ourselves in relation to the living world?
1. What is biomimicry — and how is it different from simply copying nature?
Three modes of engagement
Biomimicry engages with nature in three ways: as a model (emulating nature’s designs, processes, and systems), as a mentor (treating nature as a teacher rather than a source of extraction), and as a measure (using life’s principles as an evaluative standard for what we create and how we organise ourselves).
Biomorphic, biophilic, bio-based — and biomimetic
These are related but distinct. Biomorphic design copies form; biophilic design works at the level of the human-nature connection and the psychological wellbeing that comes from it; bio-based materials literally use biological matter. Biomimicry, properly understood, goes deeper — it seeks to understand the function and strategy behind a natural phenomenon, and to emulate that at the level of principle.
Function over form
A key example: iridescent beetles and berries produce colour not through pigment but through a spiralised nano-structure in their surface. Understanding and emulating that function has led to innovations in coloration that use no mining, no toxic dyes, and produce no waste — because the insight was functional, not merely visual.
🌱 Seed:
Copying nature’s appearance is relatively easy; understanding why something works the way it does — and what principles are at play — is where biomimicry’s real depth lies.
2. What does it actually look like to learn from or listen to an organism or ecosystem?
Reconnect first
The first step in biomimicry practice is reconnection — returning to embodied relationship with the living world through immersions, nature journalling, and extended time outdoors. Even scientists who study organisms under a microscope have often never spent a week outside in actual relationship with the ecosystems they study.
Then deepen curiosity
The second step is building genuine curiosity about how and why a particular strategy or system works — not just what it looks like, but what evolutionary pressures shaped it, and what its function is in context.
Then work with principles and ethos
The third step is ethos — understanding the deeper principles at play and asking: what does this suggest about how we might live, design, or organise ourselves? This is where life’s principles become a lens, not just a checklist.
Ask Nature as a bridge
The Ask Nature platform — now including a chat function trained on Janine Benyus’s writing and thousands of biological strategies — was built to bridge the gap between deep ecological knowledge and nature-curious practitioners. It allows someone to arrive with a design challenge or a social problem, find examples from nature, and begin the process of translation.
🌱 Seed:
Listening to nature is a practice, not an event — it requires slowing down, building attentiveness over time, and being genuinely open to learning something that disrupts what you already thought you knew.
3. Can biomimicry be applied to systems — not just products — and what does that look like?
From innovation to systemic change
Biomimicry has historically been strongest in product design and material innovation, and those pathways are now well-developed. But the field is increasingly turning toward larger questions: how might we look to nature for insight into financial systems, governance structures, social behaviours, and the conditions under which minority approaches become the majority?
How does systemic change happen in nature?
One of the most interesting questions being explored is: when we look at how a marginal system becomes dominant in nature — how things “go viral” in living systems — what can we learn about how societal values shift? This represents a still-early but genuinely new frontier for the field.
Nature of Fashion and buildings & cities
Current programmes include work on fashion waste (learning from nature’s decomposers to rethink chemistry and materiality) and a 12-month Co-Lab on buildings, cities, and infrastructure — bringing together engineering firms, thought leaders, and various organisations to ask how to leapfrog incremental improvements toward a genuinely nature-positive built environment.
🌱 Seed:
Applying biomimicry beyond the product level means asking not only what we should make differently, but how we might organise and decide differently — and what nature might teach us about that.
4. Where does biomimicry hit its limits — and what lies beyond them?
The ceiling of the current economic system
Biomimicry in product and business-model innovation reaches a ceiling when the underlying economic system cannot move any further — a pattern also visible in sustainability and circularity work. The system itself — its incentive structures, its time horizons, its notion of value — becomes the constraint.
A new frontier: learning from nature to shift values and behaviours
The more recent and still-emerging focus is on using nature’s principles to understand how to shift not just what we make, but who we are as a society — our values, behaviours, and relational patterns. This is the work the co-lab and the Nature of Trust project are beginning to open up.
None of it is easy
There are tried and tested pathways for entrepreneurial innovation in biomimicry. There are not yet equivalent pathways for transforming economic and political systems. That work remains to be done — and its difficulty should not be underestimated.
🌱 Seed:
Biomimicry is mature enough that its limits are becoming visible — and those limits are the frontier: the places where the practice must deepen or transform in order to address what is most urgently needed.
5. How do you navigate the tension between nature’s operating principles and the systems we actually live inside?
Nature doesn’t recognise profit, quarterly targets, or nation-states
Human economic and political systems are built on constructs that have no analogue in living systems. When biomimicry practitioners work within those systems, there is an inevitable tension — between the principles that emerge from deep engagement with nature and the constraints of the world as it currently exists.
Resource flows and financial systems
Biomimicry 3.8 is currently exploring what nature can teach about resource flows and financial systems — how the circulation, distribution, and metabolism of resources might be redesigned with life’s principles as a guide. This work is early and not yet public, but it represents the field beginning to engage directly with the systems that most constrain its application.
The question of what gets distorted in translation
Not all translations of natural principles into human systems are faithful. Concepts can be taken up shallowly, or used to legitimise practices that are fundamentally at odds with the underlying principles. The work of maintaining integrity in that translation is ongoing.
🌱 Seed:
Nature operates without the constructs that most constrain human systems — and that makes engaging with those constructs, rather than working around them, one of the most important and difficult challenges for the field.
6. Is there a role for biomimicry in governance and leadership?
The Living Systems Alliance
The Biomimicry Institute is a partner in the Living Systems Alliance — a collaboration with Kincentric Leadership, the Global Ecovillage Network, Transition Network International, and Permaculture UK — which is currently (March 2025) running an open call for pilot regions. The project explores how life’s principles can serve as a lens for governance structures, decision-making, and leadership in communities.
How does nature build trust? How does nature change governance?
These are, some of the most interesting questions the field can now ask. The Nature of Trust, a project by Biomimicry for Social Innovation, is one early example of applying biomimicry to the question of how trust emerges, is sustained, and can be rebuilt in human systems.
Untapped potential
The application of biomimicry to governance and leadership remains largely underdeveloped. The examples exist, the questions are forming, but the field is in early stages — and the potential, given the governance crises of this moment, seems significant.
🌱 Seed:
If nature has 3.8 billion years of experience in building systems that are resilient, adaptive, and capable of sustaining life — then the question of what nature can teach about governance is not a marginal one.
7. What tools and indicators does the Biomimicry Institute use to evaluate its work?
Life’s principles as the primary framework
Life’s principles — a set of deep patterns found across all of life — serve as the primary evaluative lens. They are not a fixed checklist but a set of generative questions: is this approach adaptive? Does it use life-friendly chemistry? Does it build resilience through diversity? Does it optimise the whole rather than maximising a single part?
Context-dependent metrics
For entrepreneurial and product-level work, there are now fairly developed matrices — adapted for products, platform technologies, and business models. For systemic and behavioural work, measurement frameworks are still emerging. What is consistent is the anchor: life’s principles as the standard, rather than conventional sustainability metrics.
Platform technologies over isolated products
In the Ray of Hope accelerator, a shift is visible: the most promising innovations are not single products but platform technologies — whole new approaches to dyeing, fabrication, coatings, and materials that open up new possibility spaces rather than improving existing ones.
🌱 Seed:
Measuring against life’s principles is not a formula — it is an ongoing practice of asking whether what we are creating is moving toward or away from the conditions that sustain life.
8. Are there limits to how quickly we can apply nature’s intelligence — and are there aspects of nature we should not mimic?
Everything in nature can be learned from — even the difficult parts
The question is not whether to engage with challenging aspects of natural systems, but what we choose to emulate and why. We can learn from predation, from parasitism, from extinction events — what matters is the quality of attention and the ethical framework brought to that learning.
The deeper challenge: time horizons
Nature operates across timescales that dwarf the human lifetime. The transitions we need to make — in our built environment, our social systems, our economic structures — will also take more than one lifetime. The fundamental mismatch is not between human ingenuity and natural complexity, but between short-term thinking and the long-term responsibility that living systems demand.
Humility about our own smallness
Amanda described carrying a heart-shaped rock as a reminder of her own place in the vastness of Earth’s story. Human society has developed an inflated sense of its own centrality — and the practice of biomimicry, at its best, dismantles that. The work of shifting from short-term extraction to long-term responsibility may be, above all else, a practice of recovering humility.
🌱 Seed:
The question is not whether we can apply nature’s intelligence fast enough — it is whether we can develop the patience, humility, and long-term thinking to stay in genuine relationship with it over the time that real transformation requires.
9. What does biomimicry practice look like applied to cities and infrastructure?
A leverage point for change
Buildings, cities, and infrastructure represent the environments in which most people spend most of their time — and therefore one of the most powerful leverage points for shifting lived experience. The built sector is also one of the most conservative, fractured, and resistant to systemic change.
The Co-Lab approach
Rather than prescribing a vision, the Institute’s Co-Lab on buildings, cities, and infrastructure has used genuine co-creation: bringing together large engineering firms, thought leaders, and organisations including the World Economic Forum to surface what is actually blocking change. What has emerged is that the barriers are not primarily technical. The tools and innovations exist. What is missing is a behavioural and values shift — and a new story about what the built environment is for.
Telling the story of the current system’s absurdity
One direction the group has moved toward: making the dysfunction of the current system visible. Buildings that make people sick, cut them off from fresh air and natural light, reduce productivity, and poison waterways — once you look at how we currently build, the question becomes not “why change?” but “why did we ever accept this?”
🌱 Seed:
The built environment is not an infrastructure challenge — it is a values challenge. And values change through stories, relationships, and the slow accumulation of different experiences of what is possible.
10. How does the practice of biomimicry change how we see ourselves in relation to the living world?
Humility as the foundational shift
For Amanda, biomimicry has been, above all, a practice of humility — not as a virtue to be cultivated, but as a natural consequence of genuine learning. When you slow down enough to truly observe, when you quiet the certainty of what you already think you know, when you remain open to being surprised: the experience of your own smallness becomes not diminishing, but clarifying.
Quieting cleverness
One of the most consistent things biomimicry seems to do for those who practice it, is to quiet our “cleverness” — the habitual reaching for what we already know, the tendency to frame every problem through existing categories. What takes its place is a different quality of listening: slower, more open, more genuinely relational.
A different relationship space
Over time, the practice shifts not just what you design or decide, but how you relate — to the living world, to others, and to your own uncertainty. It places you in a different kind of relationship space: one where listening is primary, where reciprocity is not a nice-to-have but a foundation, and where the measure of good work is whether it creates conditions for more life.
🌱 Seed:
The deepest return of biomimicry practice may not be better products or more resilient cities — but a different sense of who we are, and what we are part of.
Cross-cutting insight threads
Observation → Curiosity → Principle → Application
Biomimicry practice begins not with a solution but with a practice of attention — and it is the quality of that attention that determines the depth of what becomes possible.
Form → Function → System → Values
The field has evolved along this trajectory: from copying forms, to understanding functions, to applying systemic principles, to — now — asking what nature can teach about the values and behaviours that shape human systems.
Western science ↔ Indigenous knowledge
Biomimicry has largely developed within a Western scientific framework — but the wisdom of long-term, embodied relationship with specific places and species that Indigenous knowledge holds may be its most important complement. The Institute is beginning to explore this through its Indigenous Advisory Council and the braiding of knowledge frameworks in Ask Nature.
Short-term thinking ↔ Long-term responsibility
The mismatch between the time horizons of human systems and those of living systems is one of the deepest structural tensions in the work — and addressing it may require not just new tools, but a different relationship to time itself.
Knowledge → Trust → Action (not automatic)
As with emotional ecology, the pathway from learning to care to changed behaviour is not guaranteed. What bridges the gap is relationship — and relationship requires time, attention, and presence that modern institutions rarely support.
Closing
These sessions are not designed to arrive at fixed answers, but to surface how different approaches work in practice. Each conversation reveals not only how and where they hold, but also the tensions and questions that remain unresolved—and that continue to invite further inquiry.
Over time, these syntheses form a growing body of insights into what co-creation with the more-than-human world might require, across contexts and practices.
The Co-creation with the More-than-Human sandbox is a collaboration between The Repatterning Collective and Kincentric Leadership.
If you’d like to receive announcements of our popular monthly online learning sessions, which use live dialogue & discussion to explore different approaches and praxes for meaningful co-creation with the more-than-human (natural) world, then register here for the sandbox’s mailing list.
To receive syntheses of Learning Sessions and Field Dialogues in your inbox, subscribe below.
We donate our time and energy to this sandbox. If you value this space, consider co-funding this work by leaving us a tip.