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Have you ever had a problem you just can’t solve, no matter how many ideas you throw at it? When that happens, there’s one question I’ve learned to ask: how might nature solve this? A couple of years ago, I took on a design project inspired by my dad. He spent most of his life chasing sheep through the mountains of Kerry, so he’s always been used to steep hillsides. But as the years went on, I started to notice his pace slowing. Nothing unusual. Just aging. That small change sparked a bigger thought. If a healthy, capable man slows down with time, what about people with reduced mobility because of injury, physical challenges, or mental challenges? For many of them, the barrier to accessing the outdoors is simply too high. So I set out to design a device that could help people walk across hillsides more easily. I started the way a lot of us do. Confident. Bright-eyed, bushy-tailed, and ready to make my mark. With CAD, mechanics, and everything else at our disposal, I thought we could engineer our way through anything. Then came the prototypes. Most looked like an unnatural brace: robotics on one side, a battery pack on the other, moving the user’s leg for them. It didn’t feel right. And the worse it got, the more I doubled down. I over-engineered the over-engineered, until I’d basically built Wallace-and-Gromit-style propulsion pants. The kind my dad would never wear, and that might set him on fire. Bad ideas piled up. Stress piled up with them. Time felt like sand sliding through an hourglass. At peak stress, I walked out the door and went for a walk. I stopped thinking about bolts, pulleys, and robotics, and I started paying attention to what was around me. And then I saw an Irish hare dart across the field and spring away with effortless efficiency. My first thought was simple: why couldn’t I have something like that for my project? Then the real thought landed. Why couldn’t I? I went back to my desk and started researching animals that move efficiently. That’s how I found the wallaby. Wallabies can store energy in their hind legs and release it to propel themselves forward. Think of it like a rubber band stretched and held under tension inside the body until it’s needed. I didn’t copy a wallaby “exactly.” I took the underlying idea because it works. That approach has a name: biomimicry. The term was popularized in the 1990s, but the concept is much older. Da Vinci explored it when he studied birds to design early flying machines. And it shows up in modern engineering too. Take the Japanese bullet train. Early designs had a major issue: when the train exited a tunnel, the pressure change created a loud sonic boom. Engineers struggled, until one of them, a keen bird watcher, noticed something in nature that moves cleanly between two “densities.” A kingfisher dives from air into water to catch its dinner and barely makes a ripple. The engineers modeled the train’s nose after the kingfisher’s beak. The boom disappeared. The train became faster, more efficient, and better designed. Here’s the important caveat I learned: sometimes you can copy nature directly, but most of the time you’re looking for patterns. When I returned to my own project, I had a mechanism inspired by a macropod, but I still faced a practical problem. How do you build a structure that fits a human body comfortably and efficiently? Traditional manufacturing often starts with a big block of material, then carves away until you’re left with a different-shaped block. Lots of waste. Nature doesn’t work like that. In nature, there is no waste. There is only fuel. Things don’t grow by subtraction. They grow by addition. So I changed my approach. I used software that removes unnecessary material while keeping the same structural integrity and strength. The result is lighter, far less wasteful, and it looks organic. That software itself was inspired by how mammalian bones grow. Bones look odd at first glance: holes, struts, strange shapes. But there’s a reason. Nature distributes limited resources for maximum efficiency. By the end, I had something that flowed with the user instead of working against them. It felt as much like art as engineering. And the biggest takeaway surprised me. The real breakthrough wasn’t just the device. It was the mindset. The inspiration. The biomimicry. Biomimicry is a powerful idea, and it isn’t reserved for designers. If you’re building an algorithm, you can learn from how honeybees coordinate work. If you’re trying to heat and cool buildings better, you can learn from termite mounds. These aren’t cute metaphors. They’re real examples with real results. Even my dad started collecting and filtering water using an approach inspired by how trees do it. What matters most, though, is what biomimicry offers for our biggest challenges. Take the climate crisis. Some days it feels bleak, like the problem is too big. But there is hope. If we look, and if we listen, nature shows us processes that already work. I genuinely believe biomimicry can help unlock solutions out of ecological disaster. Yes, we’re pushing the natural world close to the brink. Without intervention, it may be too late. But it is possible. We can do it. And we have to remember one thing. We are not separate from nature. We are part of it. If we want a green and blue, circular and sustainable world, it can start with one question: How would nature solve this?