Friday, November 23, 2007

Milkweed Pods

I was at a dinner recently where Mark Anderson spoke. I was a little tired, and Mark sometime takes ten paragraphs to say ten sentences, but I was really struck by one of Mark's points. Mark addressed biology as a source of design inspiration and he made the point that when a function has emerged in nature, the natural design is usually the BEST design for that particular function. E.g. fish generally translate energy into motion more efficiently and effectively than any human design to do the same thing. I think the airborne distribution of seeds by plants like the milkweed is a great example of this.
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