The lectures began at 10am this morning but in fact the day started a lot earlier for me. I had a bad night because I could not stop wondering if I was in the right course… That is why I started the day with anxiety and a lot of expectations.
During the morning, we had another presentation of the website Being-here.net, which was a bit more interesting than the previous one. Yet, I don’t see the point when we are supposed to collect articles about subjects we do not understand and we don’t have time to read. The short film we saw about bio-based solution developed at TU-Delft shown some inspiring ideas… and it was clear that it was not about Biomimicry Design! We heard from some interesting ways to exploit nature, but it was again about harnessing it and not taking inspiration from it.
I left the classroom with mixed feelings and doubtful: at least the course started to become interesting, but I was still expecting for more. Then, the lecture we had after lunch with a biologist completely changed my situation. He was so passionate and so communicative about his bees and birds and whales that he caught my attention during all his speech. Now, more than one day after the beginning of the course, I was finally given concrete examples of what Biomimicry Design can achieve. I was a bit more enthusiast after his talk.
Then, we began our project, which is the design of a bio-inspired building for a potential future faculty of Biomimicry Design. M. Appelman shown us some techniques to improve the efficiency of a brainstorm session. I must acknowledge of their usefulness, everything went fast and we had a enormous amount of (excellent) ideas in the end. These are definitely methods that I must remember for the future. I will welcome more organizational tips of that kind.
I ended up in group 5 in charge of the design of all the water system of the building. Together with Yiming, Laura (they have a background in nanotech), Francesco and Andrea (architecture & building engineering) we finished the brainstorm, extracted the different functions we wanted for the system and began to investigate. This time, I feel very motivated: you just have to put me in front of the problem and then I am 100% motivated. It is my nature.
I am definitely sure that tomorrow will be a great day and that our team will design innovative, clever and, above all, bio-inspired systems!
