Feral by Design | The Biomimicry Podcast - Podcasts

13:37

Looking for Lions, Finding Termites: Attention by Design

Feral by Design | The Biomimicry Podcast ·

2026/09/30

What happens when you give someone a way of looking, without telling them what to find? Pia takes one small part of her octopus-inspired innovation method out of the office and sends it on holiday to Zimbabwe with her friend Jane. The experiment starts at Eastgate Centre in Harare, the termite-inspired building from the previous episode. Jane gets one loose lens: How does this place feel? What can you hear? What do you notice? What surprises you? Then Pia gets out of the way. What begins as a...

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13:22

How Termites Taught a Building to Keep Cool (Eastgate...

Feral by Design | The Biomimicry Podcast ·

2026/09/10

Eastgate Centre in Harare, Zimbabwe, is one of biomimicry’s most famous buildings. Designed by architect Mick Pearce and inspired by termite mounds, its passive cooling system uses around 90% less energy for heating and cooling than comparable conventionally air-conditioned buildings. Thirty years later, Feral went inside. Our first roving correspondent, Jane, went into Eastgate to find out what this famous piece of termite-inspired architecture actually feels like today, how its passive cool...

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7:46

How Mosquitoes Inspired Painless Needles (REVISITED)

Feral by Design | The Biomimicry Podcast ·

2026/09/01

Last week, we looked at the biology behind GLP-1 medicines like Ozempic and Wegovy. This revisited Season 1 episode looks at the other half of that moment: the needle itself. Mosquito mouthparts have inspired researchers and designers working on less painful needle technology, microneedles and medical devices. Their six-part feeding system works very differently from a conventional needle, using multiple tiny structures together rather than one blunt puncture. When you were a kid, did you eve...

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16:27

Ozempic's Secret Weapon: What The Gila Monster Taught Us

Feral by Design | The Biomimicry Podcast ·

2026/08/24

What does Ozempic have to do with a venomous desert lizard that spends most of its life underground? This story starts at 3am with a unicorn saying the word chocolate fifteen times, and ends with the Gila monster, GLP-1, Ozempic, Wegovy and one tiny molecular difference that helped change modern medicine. Our bodies already make GLP-1. It works beautifully, then disappears in minutes. The Gila monster carries a remarkably similar molecule called exendin-4, except nature built this one differe...

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13:43

Knowing When to Stop: 3 Things Worth Stealing From an...

Feral by Design | The Biomimicry Podcast ·

2026/08/10

In 1971, a temp agency ran a print ad for the perfect worker. She never took a vacation. Never asked for a raise. Never got sick. Never stopped. They called her the Never-Never Girl. Nobody prints that ad anymore. We just say it about each other. Reliable. Committed. Always steps up. This episode starts with a nearly finished episode of this show going in the bin, and then four nights of going back at it, a genuinely new idea every time, and nothing that survived. Every attempt felt like reso...

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12:13

Which Type of Explorer Are You? Lessons From The...

Feral by Design | The Biomimicry Podcast ·

2026/07/20

A three-year-old turns a stolen maxi pad into a bird, a plane, and a crown - no hesitation, no second-guessing. Three completely different uses for one object in about fifteen seconds. That moment leads to an unexpected question: why do some of us dive straight at the unfamiliar while others hang back and watch? The answer comes from decades of research on a small British songbird with a name that still makes people laugh - the great tit. Scientists have repeatedly found two distinct explorat...

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11:19

Leave It To Beavers: The London Underground Experiment

Feral by Design | The Biomimicry Podcast ·

2026/07/07

London has just rehired an employee it fired four hundred years ago. No severance. No apology. Just an awkward, "Come back. We clearly can't do your job without you." Her name's Willow, and she's a beaver. When five Eurasian beavers were reintroduced to Paradise Fields beside Greenford Tube station in West London as part of the Ealing Beaver Project, they quietly solved a flooding problem that engineers, councils and commuters had lived with for decades. But the real story sits beneath the he...

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23:29

Diminished: The Hidden Costs of Injury

Feral by Design | The Biomimicry Podcast ·

2026/06/19

A 14-year-old boy suffers two brain bleeds in a freak accident at school. He comes home and sleeps 21 hours a day. To everyone watching, it looks like the world has gone quiet. In nature, that stillness isn't defeat. It's a high-stakes repair cycle we're only just beginning to understand. This episode sits inside the gap between the crisis everyone rallies around and the long, invisible recovery nobody quite knows how to show up for, when contribution disappears, healing looks like nothing, a...

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15:50

When Red Wine Meets Your Laptop: Trainwrecks & Tree...

Feral by Design | The Biomimicry Podcast ·

2026/06/01

Red wine meets MacBook. Laundry floods. Toilet leaks. All within 24 hours. Somewhere between staring at flood-damaged laundry cabinets and Googling "how much liquid can a MacBook survive?", Pia realised she'd recently spent a lot of time thinking about forest canopies, distributed load, and what happens when systems become overly dependent on a single point. Professionally, she spends a lot of time thinking about how systems absorb pressure. Personally, she'd accidentally designed herself as ...

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19:10

Too Fast To Think: The Sloth Strategy For Better...

Feral by Design | The Biomimicry Podcast ·

2026/05/19

A homemade billy cart hurtles downhill through a suburban intersection. A keynote slide turns into an entirely new workshop framework. A conference room applauds the removal of friction from modern work. Somewhere in Costa Rica, a sloth hangs completely still above a parked car while a group of humans walk straight past it. None of these things seem connected. Until they do. This episode sits inside that moment. The realization that maybe we haven’t just sped our systems up, but quietly remov...

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8:07

Too Fast to Be Legal: The Shark Skin Scandal

Feral by Design | The Biomimicry Podcast ·

2026/05/04

Bob Hawke looks down the camera and says: any boss who sacks an employee for not showing up today is a bum. A nation stops. Beer is raised. A boat wins. A jacket becomes iconic. That’s what we remember. But under the surface, something else was happening. Not just a race between boats, but a race in how water itself was being handled. A surface that didn’t fight the flow, but shaped it. This episode sits inside that moment. It traces what happens when performance shifts from effort to design....

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17:57

Dementia: When You Can’t Tell If It’s Pain or Panic |...

Feral by Design | The Biomimicry Podcast ·

2026/04/20

A man raises a glass for two people he's loved for sixty years. A woman stands in a car park, looking up at the sky, saying: I don't know what you're trying to tell me. A baby cries, and no one knows why. None of it looks broken. But something is being lost in translation. This episode sits inside that moment. The quiet, relentless task of trying to read someone who can't tell you what they need. Of making calls with incomplete information. Of choosing a direction and not knowing if it's righ...

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18:57

S2E06 Moral Vertigo: When Distant Events Reshape...

Feral by Design | The Biomimicry Podcast ·

2026/04/06

A friend cancels a trip. Petrol prices climb. A flight route disappears. None of it looks broken, but something doesn’t quite behave normally anymore. It's April 2026, as the world watches a war reshape ordinary life from thousands of kilometres away. This episode sits inside that feeling. The strange disorientation of being physically safe, untouched by violence, and already inside its ripple. Using a biomimicry lens, Pia explores how systems respond to disturbance - not just where the disru...

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28:08

S2E05 - It’s Not What You Feel. It’s What You Emit.

Feral by Design | The Biomimicry Podcast ·

2026/03/23

I could feel them shut down. What happens when you feel yourself shift and can’t quite stop it? Weakly electric fish navigate murky water by emitting a constant field, and everything in range responds to it. Rose didn't make her team shut down. She emitted a signal. How does a system stay intelligent when defensiveness enters the room? Nature has been solving for this for 3.8 billion years. In Feral's first ever collaboration, our host Pia sits down with Rose — a leade...

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5:58

S2E04: A Feral Field Note: Biomimicry Explained

Feral by Design | The Biomimicry Podcast ·

2026/03/09

Most people have heard the word biomimicry. Very few actually know what it means. This short field note explains how the ideas in Feral by Design work — how scientists study organisms, uncover the mechanisms behind their survival, and translate those patterns into human design. Beavers, octopuses, termites… they’re not metaphors. They’re operating manuals. And once you see the pattern, you start noticing it everywhere. 🎧 feralbydesign.com | @feralbydesignpod | Created and hosted by Pia

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14:00

S2E03 Deadly Reflections: The Spider Design Solution

Feral by Design | The Biomimicry Podcast ·

2026/02/23

Nature has notes. Apparently, she delivers them in person. This week, Pia explores the "invisible" communication gap between human architecture and the natural world. From a stunned Kingfisher on her porch tiles to the critically endangered Swift Parrot fighting an extinction spiral in our cities, the stakes of our glass-heavy design choices have never been higher. How do we speak a language birds can actually read? From the "system reboot" behaviour of concussed birds to a 100-million-year-o...

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14:44

S2E02 Scratching the Wrong Itch: Wombats, mange and...

Feral by Design | The Biomimicry Podcast ·

2026/02/09

This episode came from noticing a place biomimicry could quietly change the way I work, thanks to a wombat called Chardonnay. I've treated wombats with mange in the wild. Every few days, we hike in, pour medicine on the animal, hike back out. Weeks of this. And sometimes months later, the mange is back. And the cycle begins again. Because the mites don't just live on the wombat. They survive in the burrow. Treat the host, ignore the habitat, and reinfection undoes everything. One day, driving...

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16:58

S2Ep01: Between the Flags

Feral by Design | The Biomimicry Podcast ·

2026/01/26

A swim that went wrong. A lifesaver’s eyes locked on mine. And a question I couldn’t shake. Most safety systems are built for calm moments, but danger rarely shows up when we’re calm. At the beach, water reorganises itself minute by minute, yet the signals we rely on stay exactly the same. This episode explores what happens when static signals try to manage moving risk - and what nature does differently. From surf flags to cuttlefish, it’s about sensing change, signalling st...

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1:25

Dopa Drop #12 — Quokkas

Feral by Design | The Biomimicry Podcast ·

2025/12/22

A pre-Christmas Dopa Drop — one of twelve tiny, under-60-second December dopamine hits from Feral by Design. A short, deliberate experiment playing with different dopamine triggers and pacing across the mini series — so the style shifts on purpose. Not a biomimicry episode — just quick, nature-tinted perspective for the days when December does December. If one of these gives you a lift, please share it with someone else in December mode. 🎧 feralbydesign.com | @feralbydesignpod | Created and

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0:32

Dopa Drop #11 - Wave

Feral by Design | The Biomimicry Podcast ·

2025/12/21

A pre-Christmas Dopa Drop — one of twelve tiny, under-60-second December dopamine hits from Feral by Design. A short, deliberate experiment playing with different dopamine triggers and pacing across the mini series — so the style shifts on purpose. Not a biomimicry episode — just quick, nature-tinted perspective for the days when December does December. If one of these gives you a lift, please share it with someone else in December mode. 🎧 feralbydesign.com | @feralbydesignpod | Created and

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