Andy Middleton, Biomimicry for Better Design

Nature has been solving complex problems and successfully changing worlds for over three billion years. Humans have been causing wars, poverty, pollution, hunger and toxic-designs of products (as well as lot of cool stuff) for a few thousand years. Andy Middleton Founder Director of the The TYF Group, and Founding Partner of The Do Lectures joins us to argue that if we intend sticking around to the end of the universe, we’ll need to start behaving more as though we’re a part of nature, rather than apart from nature. He’ll share ways that designers can shift their perspective of product design, processes, networks and thriveability by taking practical examples from nature and showing how they connect to today’s real challenges.

He is an imaginative and innovative thinker on sustainability and resource use, with an uncanny ability to connect practices, ideas and networks into projects that can deliver transformation. He is a change specialist, speaker and facilitator with 20+years worldwide experience of helping business and government identify and implement the transformative, disruptive change that is needed to secure economic and environmental resilience. His current research interests and practices include the use of crowd source collaboration for sustainability problem solving, building pathways for food security and integration of the ecosystems approach and biomimicry principles into strategy & decision-making.