Technological Design of Natural Exemplars

Abstract

Neither animals nor human beings accept the natural context they live in just as they find it. Instead, they try to improve their chances of survival and well-being by manipulating their external world. In human cultures, the manipulation goes further, becoming technology, whose starting point is design, and whose outcome is something artificial, in the normal sense of man-made or nonnatural. Technology, however, has always shown two faces, each reflecting a distinct anthropological disposition of man. One face looks out into the void, as it were, designing and generating original objects, resorting not only to science and mathematics but also to human imagination. We may call this conventional technology. The other face is more down to earth, although not necessarily less ambitious. While adopting much the same intellectual tools as those used for conventional technology, it aims, instead, to reproduce things already existing in nature, and may be called the technology of naturoids. It might be viewed as a kind of ultra-adaptation purposive strategy, since it not only gives rise to useful artifacts based upon natural laws, but tries to replace and sometimes improve upon natural phenomena.

This chapter will describe the general steps followed in the design of all naturoids, irrespective of their particular field of application (automata, bioengineering, robotics, prosthetics, environmental architecture, etc.). The discussion will lead, via the concepts of observation level, essential performance, and the inheritance principle, to the transfiguration effect, which all naturoids generate with respect to their natural instances, thus increasing the overall unpredictability of our future.