Learn Biomimicry with Jess Berliner, South Africa
Summary
Biomimicry is more than “nature-inspired aesthetics”—it’s a disciplined way to learn from living systems and apply those strategies to design, engineering and business.
In this episode, Learn Biomimicry co-founder Jess Berliner explains the shift from human-centric to life-centric design, unpacks the “three M’s” (nature as Model, Measure, Mentor), and shares real-world examples—from gecko-inspired carpet tile adhesion to tree-like structural composites, vortex-based mixers and a waste-to-energy plant that doubles as public realm.
We also cover how reconnection, conservation and regeneration tie into business value and practical project delivery.
Table of contents
Key takeaways
Listen to the episode
What is biomimicry?
From “knowing about” to “learning from” nature
Life-centric vs human-centric design
Biomimicry vs biophilic design
Nature as Model, Measure & Mentor
Model: Emulating strategies
Measure: Ecological benchmarks
Mentor: Ethos and reconnection
Examples in practice
Conservation, regeneration and business value
Learn Biomimicry: courses and sprints
Show notes & links
About the guest
About Green Healthy Places
Full transcript
FAQ
Key takeaways
Biomimicry = emulation, not imitation. It abstracts nature’s strategies into design methods and metrics.
Three M’s: nature as Model (what to emulate), Measure (ecological performance benchmarks), Mentor (ethos and decision-making lens).
Beyond aesthetics: moves from human-centric to life-centric design with regenerative intent.
Built-environment impact: materials engineering, product design, architecture, IAQ and systems thinking.
Proven cases: gecko-inspired carpet tile connectors, tree-like composites, vortex mixers, waste-to-energy architecture with civic benefits.
Business value: efficiency, reduced toxicity, resource circularity, higher-quality user experience and reputational gains.
Practical entry points: e-book, short courses, mentored programmes and rapid innovation sprints.
Listen to the episode
Subscribe to Green Healthy Places: Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube (coming soon)
What is biomimicry?
Biomimicry is the conscious emulation of nature’s genius—learning from living systems to inform better design, engineering and business decisions.
From “knowing about” to “learning from” nature
Western practice has catalogued nature extensively; biomimicry asks us to learn from mechanisms and relationships to solve problems more elegantly and with fewer unintended harms.
Life-centric vs human-centric design
The mindset shift is from user-only optimisation to conditions conducive to life—for people, ecosystems and future generations.
Biomimicry vs biophilic design
Biophilic design brings nature into spaces (plants, patterns, daylight, materiality). Biomimicry emulates how nature achieves functions (structure, adhesion, ventilation, filtration, colour) and evaluates outcomes against ecological benchmarks. They are complementary, but not the same.
Nature as Model, Measure & Mentor
Model: Emulating strategies
Identify a biological model (e.g., gecko adhesion), abstract the underlying mechanism, and apply it appropriately to a design challenge.
Measure: Ecological benchmarks
Benchmark performance against natural analogues—e.g., indoor air quality that approaches clean outdoor air, or materials/chemistry that avoid persistent toxins.
Mentor: Ethos and reconnection
Adopt an ethos that asks, “What would nature do here?” Reconnect teams with living systems to guide choices toward life-friendly outcomes.
Examples in practice
Interface “Tactiles”: self-adhesive carpet tile connectors inspired by gecko feet, avoiding toxic glue and simplifying replacement.
Forest-floor camouflage logic: tile graphics that allow randomised replacements without visible patching, improving resource efficiency.
Strong by Form — Woodflow: tree-like material distribution to create strong, lightweight composite structures from wood-based feedstocks.
Pax Lily impeller: vortex-inspired fluid mixer achieving large-scale mixing with far lower energy and footprint.
Copenhill (BIG): waste-to-energy plant that heats homes and doubles as public space (ski slope, climbing wall), reframing industrial assets as civic amenities.
Conservation, regeneration and business value
Studying nature revalues ecosystems as a living library; aligning built projects to ecological performance pushes outcomes toward regenerative targets. The business upside includes efficiency, reduced embodied and operational impacts, healthier interiors and stronger brand equity.
Learn Biomimicry: courses and sprints
Learn Biomimicry provides: a free e-book for fundamentals; asynchronous short courses; six-month mentored programmes for educators and practitioners; and biomimicry sprints (4–6 weeks) using an AI-assisted tool for lower-risk innovation.
Listener offer: 10% off the short-course set with coupon Matt Morley.
Show notes & links
Related GHP episodes/posts: Eco hotel interiors; Regenerative Real Estate
About the guest
Jess Berliner is co-founder and Director of Product at Learn Biomimicry. She has co-authored learning products spanning short courses, mentored programmes and e-books, making biomimicry accessible and applicable for designers, engineers and educators.
About Green Healthy Places
Green Healthy Places explores well-being and sustainability in the built environment through concise, practical conversations with global practitioners and thinkers. Hosted by Matt Morley.
Full transcript
Green Healthy Places
Welcome to episode 87 of the Green Healthy Places podcast, in which we explore the themes of well-being and sustainability in the built environment. I'm your host, Matt Morley, and we're delighted to be back after an unavoidable break with another series of concise, practical conversations from inspiring figures around the world.
This week, we're in Cape Town, South Africa, talking to Jess Berliner, co-founder and director of product of Learn Biomimicry. Over the last six years, Jess has co-authored all of her company's learning products, short courses, six-month mentored programs, and e-books.
She's a self-professed nature nerd, a scuba diver. So who else better to talk us through the topic of biomimicry? Jess, welcome to the show. Great to have you with us.
Jess Berliner
Thank you so much, Matt. It's great to be here.
Green Healthy Places
Let's jump in. Why don't we start by explaining what biomimicry is for the uninitiated, but also thinking about how it can be used and applied in the real world and therefore, in a way, who it's most relevant to.
Jess Berliner
Amazing. So yeah, let's start right at the very beginning, right? Biomimicry can be quite a mouthful as a word. When we break it down into its simplest components, we've got “bio” meaning life and “mimicry” or “mimic” meaning to imitate.
You could really define biomimicry as innovation inspired by nature. That is really how it is most broadly understood. We can take a step further and actually call it the conscious emulation of nature's genius. Maybe later on we can get into that.
Really, that is where it starts: looking to nature so we can actually learn from it instead of just about it. Until now, at least in westernized societies, we've had this very “knowing about nature” view. We know all about things, we've given them names, we've got loads of data, but we haven't really stopped to actually think about what we might learn from it.
So that's the major perspective shift that biomimicry brings to us. As to where it is applied—this is tricky, because kind of everywhere and anywhere. Maybe I could jump into where it's most impactful.
I strongly believe that biomimicry is incredibly impactful in spaces such as the built environment, especially in things like materials engineering as well. In the design and engineering world it is very relevant as an exact design methodology.
It also—again we can get into this—asks a philosophical shift of us in the businesses that we're running and the kinds of businesses that we want to create, the kind of spaces that we want to create, and who we're really building for. On the practical design side: design engineering, chemical engineering, textiles, built environment—you name it.
Then on the business side and the philosophical side, we get into bigger questions around how I might design that. At its very core, biomimicry is a mindset and a methodology that really brings life into the center of the conversation.
So instead of design being very human-centric, it becomes bigger than that—life-centric and life-friendly.
Green Healthy Places
So how would you distinguish between a concept that's perhaps slightly better known—or that at least on this podcast, we've spoken about more often in the past—which would be biophilic design?
Nature-inspired design or interiors to bring the outside world in. Would that almost be a subset of biomimicry? Do you see it as one macro, one micro? Are they two sides of the same coin in your mind?
Jess Berliner
Good question. I think they're related. They're in the same general “species” of design, but they're not the same thing. Biophilic design, in my understanding, is really bringing the living world into our buildings and bringing us closer back to nature in terms of proximity and what we choose to include in our built environment—plants and other living elements.
Biomimicry, as I was mentioning, is more this conscious emulation of nature's genius. If I unpack that, it helps to distinguish them. When we're emulating, we're not just copying directly. We're not necessarily using biology, which is more in that bio-utilization space, but we're emulating it.
We learn from the mechanisms and strategies that nature holds and then abstract and apply that to our design. That is the emulation.
The conscious part is being deliberate. It's not a slap-dash “oh, this looks like a bird's nest, therefore it's biomimicry.” It's going deeper: is this actually life-centric? What am I doing to make this more regenerative, instead of just “it looks like that.”
Biomorphic means it just looks like something natural; it doesn't go beyond that. Biomimicry brings us to deliberate emulation, as opposed to just inclusion.
Green Healthy Places
It does, yes. To provide more context for listeners: you're providing courses on this subject; you're theorizing on the topic. I often find with someone who's involved in the theory as well as the practice, they get good at creating models and methodology.
I saw one mentioned on your website that has the three M’s that caught my attention—nature as model, measure, and mentor. Can you talk us through how that relates to biomimicry thinking?
Jess Berliner
Absolutely. I'm glad you used the phrase “biomimicry thinking” because there is a specific design methodology, but there's also a bigger mindset around it.
The original pioneers of the biomimicry space—Biomimicry 3.8, Biomimicry Guild, Biomimicry Institute—started pulling together different ways of looking at nature.
Bringing in these methodologies, the three M’s—model, measure, mentor—are three lenses you might look at nature through. You'll often find someone might have an affinity toward one or more of them, even without knowing about biomimicry. With nature as model, this is in that emulation space: we're looking at nature as a biological model for something we want to emulate.
With nature as measure, we're looking at how nature performs an analogous task or design function.
We ask: nature performs at a particular level—how can we get close to that? It's benchmarking. If we're going to design a building, how might our building perform the same ecological services as that ecosystem? How might we filter as much water, store as much carbon, build as much habitat and biodiversity, restore soil in the same way?
We start to look at ecological benchmarks. We can even look at it at a chemistry level—nature creates incredible colors in a life-friendly way. How might we do something similar? We're constantly measuring ourselves against what nature has already achieved.
Lastly, nature as mentor falls more into the philosophical space: if you looked at nature overall as a mentor, how might nature approach this? How might you create conditions conducive to life? What might happen if your design function were actually happening in nature? It brings us back to our relationship with the natural world and how we approach it.
So yeah, those are the three M’s of biomimicry.
Green Healthy Places
It's fascinating. I think about this a lot with indoor air quality (IAQ). Often, what I'm trying to do in a healthy building is get the indoor air to be as good as fresh natural air.
Jess Berliner
Right?
Green Healthy Places
That's all it really is: taking nature as the measurement. That's my benchmark—air should not be polluted—and we're trying to get to that.
Then you have an interesting space around recovery and biohacking—like a hyperbaric oxygen chamber—where natural air is enhanced to give you something more based on what we think is good for recovery after strenuous exercise.
So that idea of having nature as your benchmark filters through into lots of other parts of creating a healthy indoor environment, which is really just “as natural as possible.”
Jess Berliner
Mm-hmm. Totally.
Green Healthy Places
So if there's speed of biomimicry, then the idea is emulating. If there's an ethos around it and a reconnection, is reconnecting with that natural state the wider concept within biomimicry?
Jess Berliner
Yeah, absolutely. As you mentioned, these are the three seeds of biomimicry: emulation (which we can jump into), ethos (our relationship with the living world—our design intentions, vision, and paradigms), and reconnection or connection.
It's a deliberate stance toward closing the gap that has widened over the last few hundred years in westernized societies, where we have an enormous disconnect from the living world.
We as human beings are nature—we are living, breathing, walking nature—but we generally don't see ourselves as that. Especially in built-up cities, we have enormous disconnection from anything in the living world; even our food systems speak to our disconnect and misunderstandings.
Biomimicry asks, encourages, and enables us to reconnect with the living world. For those who already feel connected, it's about going deeper.
For those who have never had, or have completely lost, that connection, it's about building bridges and creating opportunities again to fall in love with the wonder of the living world, find our place in it, and come home to nature.
Green Healthy Places
It feels like there might be more of this around all of us than we're aware. Looking at practical examples—I saw one on your website from a product I've used in interior projects—Interface, the big carpet brand. I've been impressed by their philosophy on sustainability and becoming circular. They have a product called “Tactiles.”
So that's one example. Could you describe for someone who doesn't know what it is how it works, and then give one or two other examples out in the real world as living examples of biomimicry?
Jess Berliner
Absolutely. Tactiles, invented by Interface Flooring, are small self-adhesive pads used to join carpet tiles.
They eliminate the need for toxic glues usually used to hold carpet tiles down. It's a small square that sits at the quadrant of the other tiles.
What's amazing is they mimic the gecko's foot in how it sticks to surfaces in almost any direction. They do away with toxic chemistry and reduce waste and time in laying, setting, and removing glue. That's one zoomed-in part of Interface. The backstory behind their carpet tiles is also fascinating.
They went for a walk in the forest with Biomimicry 3.8 consultants. Looking at the forest floor, they realized if you remove a leaf, you probably won't notice what changed. With carpet tiles across a huge office, there are patches of wear and tear that need replacement. Usually, when you replace them, it looks awful due to the clear divide between new and old tiles.
They realized that if they changed the graphic design of the tiles to resemble the camouflage pattern of a forest floor, you can replace tiles at random where needed, when needed, without ruining the aesthetics or replacing everything. It was a move toward being incredibly resource-efficient.
With their chemistry, they've done an amazing job of becoming more life-friendly. Building on other examples, especially in the built environment, there's an incredible company called Strong by Form.
They've developed a product called Woodflow. They looked at how trees build and distribute material. Think about how heavy branches are and yet they're held at all sorts of angles—the material distribution is key to creating these forms and how forces are distributed and balanced.
They realized they can, with computational aid, use excess woodchip waste and align and configure it into a composite material usable as a building structure. It creates incredible, beautiful, fluid-like forms using the strategies that trees use to distribute forces.
Two more quick examples—not because they're the best, but because they're illustrative of the power of biomimicry. One is the Pax Lily impeller. It was brought into the Museum of Modern Art because it's so beautiful—speaks to what happens when we emulate nature's forms.
The inventor looked at flow forms in nature and became obsessed with how fluids move—usually in a spiral or vortex.
He realized fluids like to flow in swirling spiral shapes. Often, when we're moving fluids, we're pushing them—expending great energy and pushing in ways they don't naturally go.
He invented an “impeller”—instead of a propeller—based on a whirlpool shape, “freezing” that, and working out a physical structure that mimics that spiral shape. It became a mixer for industrial setups.
It's not much bigger than my hand, runs on the energy of three 100-watt bulbs, and can mix up to 10 million gallons of water in a standing tank. The nearest competitor for an industrial mixer is bigger than your average room.
You can think about the power, energy, and installation savings you get by working with the way nature works—creating something incredibly efficient and beautiful.
The last example—not technically biomimicry per se, but a beautiful example of biomimetic thinking—is the Copenhagen waste processing plant in Denmark.
It's an incredible way of thinking about waste. They built a waste processing plant and asked: how do we turn this into something of higher value?
They built an incredible factory and casing. The only flue gas that escapes is steam. The energy generated from incinerating the waste goes to heating something like 150,000 homes.
What's really cool: it becomes a ski slope in winter; in summer you can practice skiing; there are walking slopes and what’s said to be the world's highest artificial climbing wall.
They asked: how do we increase the value of the waste we have? Those are the kinds of changes you start to see. We have examples of life-friendly concrete and shapes added to harbors to bring back biodiversity. There are so many examples, Matt—so little time.
Green Healthy Places
We'll link to all of these. And that was, just to clarify, Bjarke Ingels, isn't it?
Jess Berliner
Yes.
Green Healthy Places
BIG group.
Jess Berliner
Yes.
Green Healthy Places
We'll put those links in the show notes. Trundling along underneath all of this is the theme of protecting or conserving nature, right? If you extrapolate forward, we're going to annihilate the natural world by our actions—a disaster hypothesis over the next 100 years, but not out of the realm of possible.
So on one end, there’s time pressure: we need to do as much as we can to save and protect the natural world; at the same time, learn as much as we can and combine it with technology if needed to create innovative products that hopefully do no damage or do good and give back. How do you see the relationship between conservation/protection and biomimicry?
Jess Berliner
Great question. It's twofold. As we learn more from nature, we start to see and evaluate it differently. The need for conservation becomes inherent because it's a living library.
On the other side, the more we look at our built environments through ecological benchmarks—natural sustainability benchmarks—the more we realize we can build in ways that match those. It's both in what we value and how we shift our design to be more life-centric and think about how we actually need our built environment to function.
Does it need to be the way we've designed in the past? Could it be more life-friendly?
Green Healthy Places
Nice. Give us a quick overview of the courses and online products you're offering. What are the different ways in? From what I could see: an easy, short, quick e-book for an intro; a mid-length course; and something more involved over six months. Quick overview?
Jess Berliner
Absolutely. At Learn Biomimicry, we position ourselves as your guides into and through the world of biomimicry—your access point.
As you mentioned, there's a free e-book highlighting the basics.
Then we have a short-course set—completely asynchronous, anytime, anywhere foundational knowledge of biomimicry. It's shallow and wide, covers a lot of ground, do it as you like. Then two other offerings: mentored programs—one for educators and one for practitioners—where you bring a personal project and over six months we mentor you to apply biomimicry.
One other exciting thing: we're launching biomimicry sprints in January. It's a four- to six-week program where you jump into an innovation process. We're working with an amazing team called Asteria—an AI-powered biomimicry tool—creating a safe, easy space to use the methodology in a lower-risk, high-engagement way.
We're all about making biomimicry accessible, applicable, and affordable. That's us.
Green Healthy Places
Very cool. If people want to follow along, keep in touch, or reach out and learn more about the courses, what are your online channels?
Jess Berliner
You can predominantly find us on LinkedIn at LearnBiomimicry. Otherwise, our website is LearnBiomimicry.com. I have a small promo: for any of your listeners, there is 10% off the short-course set with the coupon code “Matt Morley.”
FAQ
-
A disciplined approach to emulate nature’s strategies (structure, ventilation, adhesion, filtration, colour, etc.) in buildings and materials, aiming for life-friendly performance.
-
Biophilic design brings nature into spaces. Biomimicry learns from nature’s mechanisms and evaluates outcomes against ecological benchmarks.
-
Model (what mechanism to emulate), Measure (how performance compares to nature’s benchmarks), Mentor (ethos guiding life-centric decisions).
-
Gecko-inspired tile connectors, tree-like composite structures, vortex-based mixers, and industrial facilities reframed as civic amenities.
-
Start with Learn Biomimicry’s free e-book and short courses; progress to mentored programmes or a sprint to apply methods to live projects.
Before you go!
Subscribe to Green Healthy Places: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | YouTube
Explore Learn Biomimicry: courses, mentored programmes and sprints (use code Matt Morley for 10% off the short-course set).