ABSTRACT
This chapter determines which kinds of biomimicry are useful as strategies for increasing the overall environmental performance of built environments. A framework for understanding biomimetic design is established to examine whether mimicking organisms or ecosystems could be an effective means to address sustainability issues. To be able to examine biomimicry’s potential effectiveness as a means of achieving greater sustainability in the built environment, it is necessary to understand what different kinds of biomimicry exist. This is important because biomimetic design is sometimes presented in a piecemeal and illogical way without sound descriptions of its different dimensions. Along with the absence of a comprehensive and rigorous general theory of biomimicry as applied to architectural design processes and their outcomes over building life cycles, this is a barrier in the application of biomimicry generally, and perhaps therefore to sustainable or regenerative design paradigms. By defining the kinds of biomimicry that have evolved, built environment professionals may be able to narrow down the parameters of biomimicry type they wish to employ depending on their overall goals. Through an examination of existing biomimetic technologies, architecture and the literature in general, it is clear that markedly different approaches to biomimetic design have evolved and can have different outcomes in terms of overall sustainability.
