Designed by Kate Reed, Beyond Biomimicry is a call to decenter the human in the design process by allowing nature to act as the designer herself, in hopes of ecological equality. The Beyond Biomimicry collection creates a wearable biophilia effect, these forms are more ancient than humans – at the same time, Beyond Biomimicry is our future.
As humans continue to augment their experience with technology, it becomes difficult to separate the influence of one from another. Nature is often not considered in the conversation between humans and machines.
The Beyond Biomimicry collection attempts to make the next generation of machines by utilizing interspecies collaboration in the design process—both computationally and physically. According to Kate, by understanding the logic behind the growth of natural processes, we can utilize natural growth logic to allow nature to design for the human body.
The Root shoe was designed by nature on a computer for the human body. This shoe utilizes a mushroom differential growth logic. The root is a shoe that is grown around the foot. It utilizes differential growth, the natural process when parts of a plant grow at different rates, causing the plant to curl in on itself. Root simulates the differential growth in mushrooms as a shoe.
Kate Reed is a Bio-designer who will demonstrate wearable technology and deliver a 90-minute-long exciting tutorial at the upcoming Computational Design: NEXT 14 online conference. Kate received two undergraduate degrees after graduating from the MIT-backed NuVu Studio, one in Social Innovation & Entrepreneurship at Brown University and the other in Industrial Design & Computational Technology at The Rhode Island School of Design.
