Nature and social insects can be the inspiration for human products, including architecture, which the social biomimicry conference at ASU explored this weekend.Six ASU graduate students coordinated “Social Biomimicry: Insect Societies and Human Design,” with most funding coming from the Frontiers in Life Sciences Conference Series.
The students received a $30,000 award from the series to put on the conference, which hosted 19 speakers from ASU and other universities and companies.
Adrian Smith, a biology doctoral candidate and conference organizer, said people from varying disciplines want different results when it comes to innovation and product design, and their desires only sometimes overlap.
“That’s part of why this conference is happening, just to sort of get biologists and get designers … talking about issues,” Smith said. “Specifically in this case related to social insects and how … you overlap the fields and try to work together for a common purpose.”
The concept of nature-inspired architecture is fairly new, so that’s why there was a focus on this field in the conference, he said.
“There’s not a lot of people doing it,” Smith said.
Rebecca Clark, a biology doctoral candidate, works with ASU’s social insect research group and helped organize the event.
“All of our research is focused on understanding the evolution of social systems,” Clark said.
This research focuses on insects like ants, bees, wasps and termites.
“It’s kind of an abstract connection to understanding things like how human societies work, but it gives us a basis for comparison,” Clark said.
Since the six organizers had the main interest in social insect research, the conference grew from there.
Several speakers talked about social insect nests and architecture ideas inspired by them.
One speaker was Walter Tschinkel, a biological sciences professor at Florida State University.
“Before we can talk about what we should mimic about ant nests, we have to describe what they are,” Tschinkel said. “We have to understand how they’ve come into being.”
However, he said, there isn’t much knowledge about ant nests at this point.
The nest architecture is mainly the same among different species, with shafts and chambers.
“You can see that there is a lot of variation, but they all have the same basic structure,” Tschinkel said.
Nests also have basic services, like shelter and defense.
“We can speculate that particular architectures must contribute to colony performance in particular ways,” Tschinkel said.
For example, ant nests are vertically organized by age.
Scott Turner, an environmental and forest biology professor at the State University of New York College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, works with termites for his research.
Termite mounds can be used to inspire human design, but not through full replication, he said.
“I looked at this with horror, because who wants to live in a termite mound?” Turner said, while showing a picture of a building too closely resembling a human termite mound.
Humans can use termite mound design to possibly make walls an adaptive structure with a natural ventilation system using wind, he said.
“It enables us to start thinking about turning our buildings into true living buildings,” Turner said.
Reach the reporter at reweaver@asu.edu
