Feral by Design | The Biomimicry Podcast
Feral by Design is a practical biomimicry podcast hosted by Australian innovation strategist Pia Williams that steals nature’s smartest strategies for human chaos.
What if a better way through a problem, from product and process innovation to workplace burnout, communication bottlenecks and creative blocks, could be found by bringing human insight and biology together?
Across 3.8 billion years, nature has evolved extraordinary ways to communicate, adapt, build, collaborate, protect, regulate and survive. Engaging in what Pia playfully calls Grand Theft Bio, Feral looks directly to nature for wild, elegant strategies we might steal for our own messy problems.
Each episode starts with a real-world challenge, then uses human-centred design and biomimicry to dig into how nature handles the relevant function and translate the biology into something useful. That might mean an original product or process innovation, a way to make better decisions or tackle human behaviour, or investigating what really happened when designers turned to nature for answers.
Made for curious minds, Feral translates complex biology into short, self-deprecating and highly insightful stories spanning design and innovation, lateral thinking, creative problem solving, self improvement and personal development. Whether it's applying an octopus's distributed intelligence, turning a biological strategy into a new product concept, or borrowing a beaver's approach to boundaries, Feral finds surprisingly useful ways to design, work, think and live a little differently.
Expect field experiments, self-inflicted disasters, surprising science and plenty of ideas you may want to steal.
Hit follow, and let's go steal some genius.
Nature owns the patent. We get to copy it.
Feral by Design | The Biomimicry Podcast
Latest Episodes
How Termites Taught a Building to Keep Cool (Eastgate Centre)
Eastgate Centre in Harare, Zimbabwe, is one of biomimicry’s most famous buildings. Designed by architect Mick Pearce and inspired by termite mounds, its passive cooling system uses around 90% less energy for heating and cooling than comparable ...
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How Mosquitoes Inspired Painless Needles (REVISITED)
Last week, we looked at the biology behind GLP-1 medicines like Ozempic and Wegovy. This revisited Season 1 episode looks at the other half of that moment: the needle itself.Mosquito mouthparts have inspired researchers and designers wor...
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Ozempic's Secret Weapon: What The Gila Monster Taught Us
What does Ozempic have to do with a venomous desert lizard that spends most of its life underground?This story starts at 3am with a unicorn saying the word chocolate fifteen times, and ends with the Gila monster, GLP-1, O...
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Knowing When to Stop: 3 Things Worth Stealing From an Ant
In 1971, a temp agency ran a print ad for the perfect worker. She never took a vacation. Never asked for a raise. Never got sick. Never stopped. They called her the Never-Never Girl.Nobody prints that ad anymore. We just say it about eac...
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What’s Your Risk Taking Profile? Lessons From the Great Tit
A three-year-old turns a stolen maxi pad into a bird, a plane, and a crown - no hesitation, no second-guessing. Three completely different uses for one object in about fifteen seconds.That moment leads to an unexpected question about ris...
