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Many designers have often said that the greatest designer of all time is Mother Nature. For billions of years, it has been running the most sophisticated design laboratory in existence. In our practice, we can use natural intelligence through biomimicry: learning from and mimicking the strategies found in nature to solve human design challenges. Project Ara emerges by studying inflation in natural microstructures, to revolutionise how we can create spaces and protect goods at various scales.
The work is a collaboration between ProtoÉditions, a material research platform by Tomorrow Bureau, and WINT Design Lab, a Berlin-based agency for sustainable product innovation. Project Ara unfolds as a narrative in three distinct chapters to create not just a product but a comprehensive design methodology that can be then used by other practitioners with an open source approach.
The project begins with a key phase of biomimicry: observation. Specifically, they wondered, how does nature use structure to protect its most fragile parts? Plant stems look extremely soft and sensitive, however they achieve structural rigidity by inflating their cells. Swim bladders are organs found in fish that allow them to control buoyancy, by simply inflating and deflating they help fish to remain at a specific depth without using extra energy. The pufferfish also uses controlled inflation to change its shape, either to swim better or to deter predators. In each example, there is a pattern: air and pressure can be combined to create structures that are lightweight, strong, and adaptive.
In the second part, the team begins experimenting, bringing together what they learnt in theory to practical examples. Through the loop of sketching, modelling, fabricating, evaluating, and then doing that all over again, each solution informs the next, obtaining better prototypes in each iteration. This is the same process in evolution, nature’s solutions work because they’ve been stress-tested by real conditions for generations. The ProtoÉditions and WINT team especially emphasise the importance of using the physicality of prototyping and not being limited to digital fabrication, as an essential practice to really understand a material’s behaviour.
The final chapter is the culmination of Project Ara’s research, being able to create a nature-inspired design for smart packaging solutions, which offer protection not just through strength but through intelligent structures. Rather than one-size-fits-all containers, they imagine packagings that adapt to the object they protect, providing graduated protection levels by adjusting air pressure. The team’s proposals range from micro to macro, imagining solutions for small objects up to car doors, and even in architecture as shells for buildings. While traditional packaging solutions generate massive waste, inflatable systems could be more sustainable long term and also more user-friendly, as they are developed to be more adaptive to different contexts.
By looking to nature’s time tested strategies, Project Ara points towards a future where protection is lighter, smarter, and more sustainable. It shows what biomimicry promises, a path forward that acknowledges that we are hardly the first engineers on this planet, and maybe the best designs can emerge from translation rather than invention. Nature has been solving problems of structure, efficiency, and resilience since long before we existed, why should we start from scratch if many answers are already here? If the greatest designer is indeed mother nature, Project Ara shows that the best thing we can do is to stop pretending to compete with her, and learn to collaborate instead.
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https://designwanted.com/project-ara-biomimicry-packaging-design/
