Introducing Feral by Design: Solving Human Problems with Nature

Nature owns the patent. We get to copy it.

Not another true-crime podcast… unless you count Grand Theft Bio!  In this 6-minute intro, Pia shares why she’s obsessed with stealing nature’s best strategies, and what happens when human insight meets biology.

Feral by Design brings biomimicry, human-centred design and innovation together, to look at familiar human problems differently. 

Expect short episodes that blend humour, biology and human messiness, showing how creatures from beavers to octopuses tackle challenges we face every day. Sometimes that leads to a better product or process. Sometimes it changes how we think about behaviour, decisions or systems. 

Either way, the starting point is the same: what might we see differently if we looked at how nature has already solved for it?

If you like your insights a little irreverent, a little wild, and rooted in real research, this pod is made for you.

Follow Feral for new episodes every fortnight.

Instagram / Facebook / YouTube : @feralbydesignpod

feralbydesign.com

Created and hosted by Pia Williams
Clever by Nature. Feral by Design.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:05

Hello, hello! Welcome to Feral by Design, where we take nature's genius problem solvers and see what they can teach us about handling our own chaos. I'm Pia, I'm an innovation strategist, and it seems now also a podcast host. What? I'm a bit excited, and honestly probably a little bit nervous. Because here I am, just a girl standing in front of a mic, asking it to keep its distance. Full disclosure, I genuinely have a mic aversion. At my sister's twenty first birthday years ago, I'd prepped a killer speech to bring her down, but what happened? I managed to get the braces on my teeth hooked on the mic mesh. So mum was holding the mic and wasn't looking at me. I turned my head and click. It was it was the stuff of nightmares. Trying to whisper, Mum, it's stuck, I'm stuck. Whispered out along with a few panic swear words to about a hundred people. So forgive me, it's taken a while to stand up in front of one again. Alright, mic aversion be gone. What's this podcast going to be about? True crime. Okay, that's a bit of a bait and switch, but it is about true things, and it is about crime. The clincher, I'm gonna confess to many of them and then I'm gonna give you ways to commit the crimes yourself. Not murder, that's too grim. Just theft. And I'll call it grand theft bio. That makes me laugh. TM pending. I'm gonna teach you how to steal from nature and with absolute glee. It's like sitting next to the smartest kid in the room. That's nature in this tale. And you can't help peeking over their shoulder at their answers. Because here's the thing, nature's had the solutions long before we even thought to call them problems. For instance, Velcro, that's a pretty famous one. That's just burrs being annoyingly clingy back in 1941 on a pair of socks. Or self-repairing building materials, if you've heard of those. Mussels worked that out eons ago. And as for those dysfunctional team meetings we all love, octopuses have been running distributed strategies most managers and CEOs could learn from, with three hearts and brains in their arms. Creatures and plants like these have been beta testing ideas for 3.8 billion years, and the indigenous cultures have been learning from them for thousands. Close your eyes for a second. I'm a visual person, so bear with me. Picture half the world's entire human population. That's how many years nature has been designing. One person for each year. That is the longest design sprint in history. This show exists because nature's design secrets they're too good to keep locked away in academic papers nobody reads. And the best way to prove it in my experience? It's with stories and tips that you could relate to. There's actually a name for this, biomimicry, learning from nature's strategies to solve human problems. In my day job, I use biomimicry with proper rigor, methodology, systems thinking, the whole lot to help organizations. Here, on the podcast, I get to loosen the reins and share the feral bits, the stories and aha moments, just to show you how it plays out in real life. But please keep in mind, it isn't just spot a clever animal and copy it. Done properly, it has strong methodology and ethos. And the more we learn from these incredible plants and critters and systems, the more we want to protect them, right? And protect the ecosystems that they and we, hello, we are part of nature, all depend on. Now, a quick signal. If you're already deep into biomimicry, yay! This isn't some kind of methodology course or whatever. Think of this podcast as like a tasting plate. Um I'm trying to spark curiosity and get people hungry for the deeper work that we're all trying to do. I realise how little people knew about biomimicry when I caught up at it with an old boyfriend for lunch, this is years ago, um, I told him I was doing, you know, postgrad study and biomimicry and how it really opened my eyes and I loved it. And I just remember he said, Oh my god, that's great. I've always thought you'd be brilliant at mimicry and stand-up comedy. What? That's the moment when I realise, hmm, if someone who knows me thinks biomimicry is a Marcel Marceau style, I don't know, miming gig for laughs, maybe the field needs better translators. The field itself is incredible, I love it. But it's still pretty foreign here in Australia, so I wanted to make something accessible, playful, and always anchored in real research. And you know what? I guess if this podcast fails completely, I can always try stand-up, right? As for why I've called it feral by design, I know feral is sometimes used to convey something that's gone awry or it's out of control or it's invasive, but biologists use feral to mean in a wild, untamed state. And feral animals often adapt so quickly they regain those traits lost in domestication. So they become smarter, sharper, quicker, more fit for purpose. And sometimes, yes, sometimes even bigger brained. And that's the spirit of this podcast. Untaming our thinking, so we can adapt in smarter ways, and maybe, yeah, sure, grow ourselves some bigger brains along the way, who knows? So here's what you can expect. Weekly episodes of ten to fifteen minutes. Some weeks it's a creature with a strategy you can steal, other weeks a surprising invention that you've probably used without realizing that its roots are in nature's designs. All of this wrapped up in relatable human chaos, paired with nature's elegant genius. Some strategies might click instantly for you, which is great, others might sit quietly and buried in the synapses there until you need them, like like cicadas underground, just waiting for that right moment to ta da Who knows? You might walk away with a tip or two. You might just have a sense of total awe at nature's cunning. Either way, that will make me happy. So if you're curious about what beavers can teach us about boundaries, or why octopuses might run better teams than the most of us can, or how other unlikely creatures navigate challenges that we also face, come join me. Episode one is up next. What beavers can teach us about boundaries? Nature owns the patent, and we get to copy it. I'm Pia. This is Feral by Design. Let's go steal some genius.