What do Termites and an Energy Efficient Building in Africa have in Common?

I was at the Autodesk One Team Conference last week and watched a great presentation by Frans Johansson author of Medici Effect: What Elephants and Epidemics Can Teach Us
About Innovation. Frans talked about a very interesting concept of going outside of your discipline to find interesting solutions to what may seem like impossible problems or solutions to problems that nobody knew they had like the Burquini.

Frans then talked about the Eastgate Centre in Harare Zimbabwe which uses biomimicry borrowed from Termite Mounds in African. Termites us an intricate network of tunnels to cool and heat the mounds so they stay at exactly the same temperature inside even though the temperature outside can fluctuate wildly during a single day. You can read more about it here and here.

Quite a fascinating story of using ideas completely outside of our domain to solve problems much more elegantly. As Frans said during his talk - if you have a big problem to solve you want to talk to people outside of your field because they may have solved it already or they may have a solution that nobody in your field has thought of.

So what do you think - cool, interesting or not relevant to Building Performance Analysis?

Comments

[Dexter]

Very interesting article. I really need to take care of my termites in North Carolina. Thanks for this.

[Emile]

Glad you enjoyed it and now you know how to get rid of them ... you just need to make sure they cannot control the temperature in their environment. This is assuming they have similar feeding habits as the ones in Africa.