The Ecomimicry Project
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From February 2006 to February 2009, the Ecomimicry Project worked creatively with the knowledge of artists, designers and conservationists in both Australia and Europe to design landscapes, buildings and artworks that may foster sustainability or environmental awareness within these nations.
Ecomimicry involves mimicking local animals and plants (or their ecological settings) to produce sustainable, eco-friendly, socially-responsible designs of landscapes, technologies and artworks.
The Project had two study areas. The Great Southern region of Western Australia and the Carpathian and Balkan Mountain region of Eastern Europe (from the Czech Republic to Bulgaria). Both these study areas, whilst being vastly different in terms of natural history and cultural history, measure about 1500km long, and so they made for perfect random counterparts to test the efficacy of the ecomimicry concept.
The final designs that emerged in the course of the project from 2006 to 2008 are presented in a book titled Wild Design.
The book and the Project were featured on a 2009 episode of the ABC Radio National show By Design
For 2010, new areas are being selected in Germany and New Zealand to continue on testing the ecomimicry concept.
As part of the 2006-2009 project, Ecomimicry workshops have been offered at various art centres and universities at Western Australia and the Carpathians, but artists and conservationists from around the world also contributed their ideas via electronic means.
The Project had a global element and a local element. The global element invited designers, new and established, to submit bio-inspired designs based on the wildlife and landscapes of the Great Southern region or the Carpathian Mountain region. The local element involves assembling together designers, biologists and conservationists into workshops. All are welcome to contact the Project Coordinator for more information.
Whilst Ecomimicry is a novel way of implementing bio-inspired innovations, it draws intellectual srength from the likes of permaculture, analogue forestry, biomimetics and a host of other disciplines, from the organismal scale to the landscape scale.
Ecomimicry is also a great medium for environmental education, teaching students about technical sustainability challenges and the flora and fauna of their local wildlife at the same time. An experimental education program of ecomimicry has been applied to different levels of education by various staff and students at Curtin University of Technology in Western Australia.
One of the designs to emerge from the program was the following one, prduced by staff and students of Curtin's sustainable architecture programme, it shows a sea-based shell-fish house community located in the intertidal zone of the Western Australian coast.
Ecomimicry is basically a process of innovation. It is similar to biomimicry or biomimetics but is more careful to produce designs that serve the local environment and community rather than the global marketplace or the military-industrial complex. It is design that serves the ecology and the people, not power, prestige or profit.
