Lecture Series History: 2018
In 2018, the Natural History Museum of Utah's annual Lecture Series explored the Genius of Nature: Bioinspired Design. Read on to learn more about the theme and speakers.
About the 2018 Lecture Series
Engineers, entrepreneurs, architects, and medical researchers across the world recognize the growing imperative of our coexistence with nature. The most inventive among them are inspired by the brilliant designs that exist in nature.
The idea is not new. Think Leonardo da Vinci whose sketchbooks were filled with inventions inspired by nature or the Wright brothers who studied birds when imagining a craft that could fly. Today, researchers are looking to nature and imaging everything from buildings that grow and adapt to their environments, to healthy eco-friendly sunscreen inspired by the chemical properties of hippo sweat.
The Natural History Museum of Utah invites you to hear from four extraordinary minds who have embraced nature’s elegant and innovative designs to solve some of man’s most pressing problems.
2018 Speakers
Neri Oxman
Innovation in Design
Neri Oxman is the Founder and Director of Mediated Matter design research group and Associate Professor of Media Arts and Sciences at the MIT Media Lab. Oxman's work fuses the disciplines of art, science, architecture, and ecology to form a new kind of discipline—one based on the lessons of biomimicry. Join Oxman as she provides a glimpse into the future of performance-driven design and how it is literally reshaping our physical world. Avant-garde yet wholly accessible, Oxman makes a powerful and eloquent case for adapting sustainable, nature-derived concepts to tackle our most daunting challenges in design, business, society, the environment, and our daily lives.
Michael Pawlyn
Biomimicry in Architecture-A New Paradigm
Founder of the architecture firm Exploration, Michael Pawlyn is one of many who are looking to nature for inspiration and solutions. Pawlyn argues that Biomimicry-design inspired by nature's time-tested strategies-is one of the best approaches for creating high-performance architecture and, more broadly, creating a positive future for humankind.
Join Pawlyn as he presents a number of projects that illustrate what can be achieved by using biological adaptations as a source of inspiration including buildings that are more efficient, better for people, and restore our relationship with our home.
James McLurkin
The Future of Robotics is Swarms: Why a Thousand Robots are Better than One
James McLurkin is interested in distributed algorithms for multi-agent systems--that is, software that produces complex group behaviors from the interactions of many simple individuals. While multi-robot systems have been called "the future of a futuristic field" these ideas aren't new. Ants and bees have been using this approach for 120 million years, and we can learn much from them. Join McLurkin, who has led research teams using some of the largest groups of robots in the world to test these ideas, as he illustrates the case for large populations of robots with a live 12-robot demo, and goes "under the hood" of algorithms that make them work.
Steven E. Naleway
Blueprints from Biology
Engineers like Steven Naleway of the University of Utah are harnessing the hundreds of millions of years of design experience found in nature to understand how organisms thrive in their natural environments. Naleway uses the tools and techniques of engineering, chemistry, and physics as well as lessons learned from nature to develop designs and materials that benefit society. Join Naleway as he outlines how the interconnected fields of biological materials science and bioinspired design offer the potential to provide ingenious solutions to modern engineering problems.
2018 Series Sponsors
Founding Underwriter
R. Harold Burton Foundation
Underwriter
Cultural Vision Fund
Gold Sponsor
Rio Tinto Kennecott
Silver Sponsors
The Clark Foundation
Kent C. and Martha H. DiFiore Family Foundation
The M Lazy M Foundation
Myriad Genetics
Media Partner
KCPW Public Radio 88.3 FM
Community Partners
The City Library
Kingsbury Hall
Liberty Heights Fresh
The County Library | Viridian Event Center
Institutional Support
Salt Lake County Zoo, Arts & Parks