NOTE: This introductory article was later adapted into a presentation at ISTELive25 as embedded below:

What if nature was the design partner for your classroom, your curriculum, and your organization? This question has guided my thinking for years, leading me to explore how the natural world can inform more effective approaches to learning experience design and organizational development.

Biomimicry—the practice of drawing inspiration from natural processes to solve human challenges—isn’t new. From Velcro inspired by burr seeds to bullet train designs modeled after kingfisher beaks, innovators across fields have long recognized that nature offers time-tested solutions to complex problems. What makes these natural solutions especially powerful is that they’re often sustainable, adaptable, and inherently diverse—qualities that prove invaluable when applied to learning environments.

Why Nature Makes a Good Design Partner

Nature has had over three billion years to iterate on its designs. Every system, structure, and process we observe represents countless cycles of testing, refinement, and optimization. While we shouldn’t fall into the trap of blindly copying nature—just because something works for birds doesn’t mean we should be flapping our wings—we can unfurl new ideas by thoughtfully examining natural processes.

The key lies in understanding principles rather than mimicking appearances. When termites build ventilation systems that maintain constant temperatures without external energy, the lesson isn’t about building termite-like structures. It’s about understanding how natural airflow patterns can inform sustainable building design. Similarly, when we observe how forest ecosystems share resources through underground networks, we’re not trying to grow roots—we’re exploring how knowledge and support can flow more effectively through learning communities.

This approach proves especially powerful when we’re thinking about how learners communicate, connect, and interact with one another. Natural systems excel at creating resilient networks, managing complex information flows, and adapting to changing conditions—exactly the capabilities that modern learning environments need to develop.

Getting Started with Educational Biomimicry

At its most basic level, biomimicry can be as simple as taking a walk in the woods and gaining new inspiration. But the deeper you look, the more insightful ideas you can extract and apply to your work. The process follows a straightforward framework that anyone can use, regardless of their scientific background.

Start with Real Problems: Begin by identifying specific challenges you’re facing in your learning environment. Is it student engagement? Information retention? Collaboration effectiveness? Resource distribution? Clear problem identification prevents biomimicry from becoming mere novelty and ensures that natural insights address actual needs.

Observe Your Local Environment: While famous biomimicry examples capture attention, the most relevant insights often come from your own backyard. Become familiar with the environment you breathe and work in. Local ecosystems face similar environmental pressures to your educational context—limited resources, seasonal changes, diverse populations, and the need for sustainable adaptation.

Extract Key Principles: Focus on understanding underlying mechanisms rather than surface features. How does the system work? What makes it effective? What principles enable its success? This abstraction process helps you identify transferable insights that can be adapted to learning contexts.

Apply and Iterate: Test these principles in your educational setting. Like natural evolution, effective implementation requires experimentation and refinement. Some ideas will work immediately, others will need modification, and some won’t transfer effectively—and that’s perfectly normal.

The South Dakota Advantage

Living and working in the Black Hills of South Dakota provides a particular advantage for educational biomimicry. The Great Plains ecosystem demonstrates remarkable resilience and adaptation strategies that directly parallel challenges facing educational organizations. Prairie grasses develop extensive root systems that share resources across vast networks. Pine cones use sophisticated timing mechanisms to release seeds when conditions optimize for growth. Migratory patterns show how resources can be efficiently distributed across broad geographic areas.

These local observations prove especially relevant for educational contexts across rural and suburban America, where resource constraints, geographic challenges, and the need for sustainable practices mirror the environmental pressures that shaped these natural systems.

Beyond the Classroom

While biomimicry applications in individual classrooms capture immediate attention, the most significant opportunities often lie at organizational and systems levels. How can educational institutions distribute knowledge more effectively? What natural models inform sustainable professional development? How do resilient ecosystems maintain stability while adapting to changing conditions?

These questions become increasingly important as educational organizations face budget constraints, technological disruption, and evolving learner needs. Natural systems that have successfully navigated similar challenges for millions of years offer valuable perspective on building adaptive, resilient learning communities.

Avoiding Common Pitfalls

Effective educational biomimicry requires avoiding several common traps. The appeal to nature fallacy assumes that anything natural is automatically better—but evolution optimizes for survival, not human learning outcomes. Natural systems also operate on different timescales and face different constraints than educational environments.

The key is using nature as inspiration rather than instruction manual. When birds form murmurations through simple local rules that create complex group behaviors, the insight isn’t about copying bird movements. It’s about understanding how simple interaction protocols can enable sophisticated group coordination—knowledge that can inform collaborative learning design.

Similarly, successful biomimicry requires grounding natural insights in learning science. Nature provides creative sparks and alternative perspectives, but effective implementation still requires understanding cognitive science, instructional design principles, and organizational development theory.

Building Your Observation Skills

You don’t need to be a naturalist to benefit from educational biomimicry. Local field guides, nature centers, and online resources like iNaturalist can help you identify and understand natural processes in your area. The goal isn’t encyclopedic knowledge but cultivated curiosity about how natural systems solve problems.

Start with simple questions: How do different species in your area obtain and share resources? What strategies do local plants use to compete for sunlight? How do animal communities organize themselves? What triggers seasonal changes in behavior? Each observation offers potential insights for learning design.

Even if you can’t get outside regularly, nature documentaries, scientific articles, and online resources can provide inspiration. The key is maintaining an active connection between natural processes and educational challenges.

The Collaborative Opportunity

Perhaps the most valuable aspect of educational biomimicry lies in its collaborative potential. Nature study brings together educators, scientists, students, and community members around shared curiosity. Local ecological knowledge from indigenous communities, farmers, and outdoor enthusiasts can enrich educational applications. Students become co-investigators, exploring how natural principles might improve their own learning experiences.

This collaborative approach models the interconnected thinking that characterizes healthy ecosystems. Rather than isolated implementation by individual educators, biomimicry can create learning communities that explore natural principles together, sharing insights and innovations across educational contexts.

Looking Forward

The natural world offers an inexhaustible source of inspiration for educational innovation. Every ecosystem demonstrates sophisticated approaches to resource management, information sharing, adaptation, and resilience. As educational environments face increasing complexity and change, these time-tested strategies become increasingly relevant.

The biomimicry journey begins with simple observation and grows through sustained attention to natural processes. Whether you’re designing individual learning experiences or building organizational capacity, nature provides both inspiration and wisdom for creating more effective, sustainable educational approaches.

The invitation is straightforward: step outside, observe carefully, and consider how billions of years of natural innovation might inform your work with learners. After all, the best design partner you’ll ever find might be waiting right outside your door.

Questions for Reflection

• What specific challenges in your learning environment might benefit from fresh perspectives inspired by natural processes?
• When you observe your local ecosystem, what strategies do you notice that different organisms use to share information, resources, or adapt to changes?
• How might taking regular nature walks or observations change the way you approach educational design challenges?
• What natural processes in your area demonstrate principles that could inform collaborative learning, resource sharing, or organizational adaptation?
• How could you involve learners in observing and extracting insights from natural systems as part of their educational experience?
• What partnerships with local naturalists, indigenous knowledge holders, or environmental educators might enrich your biomimicry explorations?

This introduction launches an ongoing exploration of how natural systems can inform more effective, sustainable approaches to learning design and educational innovation. While nature can’t solve every educational challenge, it offers valuable perspective on building adaptive, resilient learning communities.