AskNature

Imagine 3.8 billion years of design brilliance available for free, at the moment of creation, to any sustainability innovator in the world. 

Imagine nature's most elegant ideas organized by design and engineering function, so you can enter "filter salt from water" and see how mangroves, penguins, and shorebirds desalinate without fossil fuels.

Now imagine you can meet the people who have studied these organisms, and together you can create the next great bio-inspired solution.

That's the idea behind AskNature, the online inspiration source for the biomimicry community. Think of it as your home habitat—whether you're a biologist who wants to share what you know about an amazing organism, or a designer, architect, engineer, or chemist looking for planet-friendly solutions. AskNature is where biology and design cross-pollinate, so bio-inspired breakthroughs can be born.

Thanks to our sponsors, AskNature is a free, open source project, built by the community and for the community. Our goal is to connect innovative minds with life's best ideas, and in the process, inspire technologies that create conditions conducive to life. To accomplish this, we're doing something that has never been done—organizing the world's biological literature by function.

What you'll see on the site today is a starter culture of ideas—biological blueprints and strategies, bio-inspired products and design sketches, and biomimics you can talk to and collaborate with. Over the next few months, this genetic pool of ideas will grow as we receive natural history information from our partner, Encyclopedia of Life. Our social web will also grow, beginning with tapping into thousands of solution seekers who are part of the WiserEarth global network.

Luckily, we live on a wildly diverse planet surrounded by genius, and now there's one site where you can celebrate, learn from, and even conserve that genius. So please, come meet your mentors, get involved, and be part of the design revolution inspired by nature.

Janine Benyus
Co-Founder/Board President
The Biomimicry Institute

Biomimicry Explained

Janine Benyus describes how biomimicry works, pointing to its origins in early human history. She explains how and why western industrial nations are only now rediscovering the profound implications that biomimicry has for the future of design. Watch Video >>

12 Sustainable Design Ideas from Nature

In this inspiring talk about recent developments in biomimicry, Janine Benyus provides heartening examples of ways in which nature is already influencing the products and systems we build. Watch Video >>