Three years ago I rarely thought about rapid prototyping (though I used it) and though the idea of bio-inspired design appealed, I had not encountered the terms biomimetics or bionics. That was to change: in early 2006 I was invited to join a UK technology mission to the Netherlands and Germany to check out the state of biomimetics research in those places — I accepted and quickly did some homework. The mission was a mind-changing experience; I learned and understood, that design inspired by nature — at the level of engineering, not shape and form — was a powerful idea.
That was stage one in my ‘development’. A little after the mission, when working with the UK-government-funded Materials Knowledge Transfer Network (who had voted me onto the mission), planning began for a conference on design and materials to be staged at the Royal College of Art in London the following year. Someone suggested rapid prototyping — a pretty hot topic for designers — but I found myself saying no, rapid manufacturing, that must be far more interesting. To be completely honest, I wasn’t even entirely sure the term rapid manufacturing even had currency, but of course I Googled up a storm as soon as I unfolded my computer. I chaired the Manufacturing Reinvented conference at the RCA in September 2007, we had some great speakers and it was a huge hit. The thing is, by this time I had put two and two together, realising that additive manufacture could unlock the promise of biomimetics and/or, conversly, that biomimetics would offer a design paradigm possibly better suited to additive fabrication than conventional ‘human’ engineering and design. My contribution to the conference was on exactly that theme.
Since that time, I have developed some of these ideas, met many of the key players in RM and biomimetics theory and practice, given many talks and written a lot. I believe additive techniques will gradually replace conventional subtractive and formative manufacturing processes as this century unfolds, and I also believe that biology, Nature, will prove a very useful guide to how things can be designed, how they can function. The machines and materials we have today represent a very early stage in the development of additive technologies; we will eventually be printing stuff out at nano-scale — I have no doubt (and yes, there’s the promise of co-opting real biological material in fabrication techniques too). And the capabilities of these techniques will be so profound, there’ll be little point in using them to make things that are engineered in the mechanical idiom; we’d be far better off making them more like animals and plants. Or so the thinking goes.