“The Experience Gave Us Hope”
How the Biomimicry Student Design Challenge started an Egyptian designer on a path to help her country.
When Nariman Lotfi, a design student at Egypt’s German University in Cairo, learned about biomimicry for the first time, something clicked.
Lotfi didn’t know it at the time, but this discovery was the start of a journey that would take her from the classroom, to the stagnant canals in the region, and over 5,000 miles east to Boston to accept a first-place award from biomimicry pioneer Janine Benyus.
Shortly after first learning about nature-inspired design, Lotfi came across the 2012 Biomimicry Student Design Challenge and quickly formed a team. That year, the challenge theme was focused on water, a subject that intrigued Lotfi and her teammates right from the start. Her team of predominantly women–including Yara Yassin, Reham Mogawer, Mona Diab, Ahmed Hassan, and Doa’a Mohamed Refaat–was attracted to the potential benefits biomimicry had in addressing water-related problems in Egypt.
Lotfi and her team–who named themselves Egy-Osmo (a combination of Egypt and osmosis)–didn’t have to search far to address the challenge topic. Although their adviser suggested focusing on a smaller-scale problem, the team wanted to think bigger. “We felt that we were a small group of optimistic people, and we wanted to solve something for Egypt and for our country,” said Lotfi, “We were really passionate about solving a problem that would benefit our country as a whole.”
The Egy-Osmo team looked to create a sustainable solution to the irrigation problem that would improve the conditions and lives in Fayoum. Inspired by the giraffe and dromedary camel, they designed a bio-irrigation system called Dromedarily Sustainable. Similar to how the dromedary camel circulates water in its hump, the design team created a system that circulates water using energy captured from a waterfall to keep microbial growth down. They also looked to how the giraffe pumps blood through its neck for inspiration on how to push water through a tight container to increase speed and pressure. Essentially, Dromedarily Sustainable is a shared system–water is looped around continuously until a farmer needs it. When water is needed, the farmer can open a gate along the perimeter of the route to allow it to veer off into the farm.
Egy-Osmo submitted their design to the Biomimicry Student Design Challenge and waited. A few weeks later, they found out that they had made it to the second round and were invited to Boston to pitch their idea in front of judges.
The experience gave us hope that small ideas can become realities and that a small group of young people can dream to help their country and change the world.
In a country where political turmoil seems to take front and center stage and women are often treated like second-class citizens, Lotfi, like many in the younger generation, is working to positively impact her country. To Lotfi, people in Egypt are facing a point where they’re realizing that they need to think about other ways to solve problems. “As a country, we’re moving towards the more sustainable, more natural,” she said. “People now have this feeling that everyone wants to do something and help in one way or another.”
Lotfi doubts that she can go back to creating designs the way she used to. “The idea of strategies and cycles in nature – this is what we need to be thinking about and applying in design,” she said. “The design process is still not sustainable enough. It’s not taking into consideration how it affects other systems in other places in our environment. This is what nature does. Nature is aware of developing, adapting and evolving, but without destroying. This is what I want to apply in a design process.” Using the way nature adapts to changing environments, Lotfi wants to apply biomimicry to issues that face her country. Her future ambition is to start her own organization that creates biomimetic solutions to ultimately make a difference in her region. With her experience from the competition, Lotfi can use her new skills as a biomimetic designer to solve systems-related design problems and teach her students how to do so, as well. “A lot of my students are beginning to get the same click,” she said. “A lot of them have been researching and want to create design that is sustainable and inspired by nature but don’t know why. So then I tell them to research biomimicry, then you’ll know why.”
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