There’s an imagination-provoking post by Anthony Townsend at the IFTF’s Future Now blog, about the implications of new biological materials, and how they might start affecting how we live, and what we live in.
I see three main threads worth thinking about:
- New materials - it will start as “dead” substitutes for things we use now like steel, concrete, etc. We’ll figure out how to mass produce spider silk and it will become a ubiquitous construction material. But eventually we’ll start bioenginnering “materials” that are actually living organisms. Why build a building skeleton out of steel when you can engineer a living tree to grow itself into a self-repairing, self-cooling sustainable structure (that also conveniently removes a lot of carbon from the atmosphere).
- Bio-inspired structures and components - the most famous example of biomimicry in architecture is the Eastgate Building in Zimbabwe which cools itself in a process similar to that of a termite mound, but bio-inspired designs for structures and components that heat, cool, house, produce, or purify will become widespread as we gain much better understanding of small-scale biological processes.
- Bio-inspired systems and dynamics - as our understanding of emergence improves, we’ll increasingly seek to employ these phenomena in larger systems, and to guide the life cycle of the built environment. We’ll more explicitly incorporate biological concepts as we think about how individual buildings, rooms, and infrastructure components function within the greater whole of a street, neighborhood, or city.
