IN THE BUBBLE JOHN THACKARA - witz cultural

any attempt simply to copy the results of nature misses a crucial point:
Nature never stands still. So neither should we. Rather than try to replicate
a natural mechanism on a one-to-one basis, we would be better off understanding
both the principles of its operation and the specificities of its
context and design from there. Vincent uses the example of wood to explain
this approach. Wood is one of the most efficient of all materials in
terms of toughness and stiffness per unit weight. As a result of the angle
of the fibers in the wood cell, it has a very high energy of fracture. But
in terms of lightness, natural materials are not always the best choice.
A Dutch consulting firm, PRé, cautions that although manufacturing a
product using one kilogram of wood causes fewer emissions than the
production of one kilogram of plastic, we also need to think about the
paint to preserve the wood, the energy needed to dry it, and the amount
of materials wasted during sawing. ‘‘In some products you would need
about ten times as much wood than plastic. Plastics can often be recycled,
wood cannot,’’ says PRé. 28 Mindful of these factors, biomics like Vincent
say that once you understand why natural materials behave as they do,
one can start to incorporate their qualities into other materials. Vincent’s
team at Reading University in England is developing a glass fiber composite
material that mimics the fracture properties of wood. (A partner in the
project is Britain’s Ministry of Defence, which needs an impact-resistant
material for bullet-proof vests with a much lighter weight than current
versions.) 29
Intelligent?
Smartness 197
Biomimics want us to consider the properties not just of individual things,
but of whole systems, and the ways a system adapts to its context. Manmade
smartness can be awfully dumb. A while back I stopped off at an airport
washroom to freshen up. Before moving to a stand-up cubicle, I placed
my bag on one of the sinks. A few moments later, when I picked the bag
up again, it was full of water. The tap had opened automatically. For costsaving
and no doubt good environmental reasons, the tap had been fitted
with a chip and a sensor and told: ‘‘Only release water when someone is
standing in front of you.’’ In nature, a tap that mistook a bag for a person
would soon be extinct. I suppose a smarter successor will be developed
for the man-made world too—but at what cost in the meantime? Trial and