Excerpt from an article by Jessica Helfand on Design Observer, 10/16/07:

“Last week, I found myself in a hospital where I toured a research lab with an immunologist. He explained how scientists look at pathogens and consider better models for treating disease. Such observation, in turn, leads to more targeted clinical trials and more effective pharmaceutical therapies. But it all begins by looking at cells dividing in a petri dish. A few days later at the AIGA National Conference in Denver, biologist, writer and “biomimicry” enthusiast Janine Benyus identified existing forms in nature — from the abstraction of the Fibonacci series to the specificity of a butterfly wing — as a paradigm for rethinking man-made practices and ensuring a more sustainable future. She discussed the finer points of bird migration and showed breathtaking images of life forms, all of them perfected over time — and none of them new-and-improved.

It’s a fascinating model for design thinking, seemingly antithetical to the pursuit of innovation, yet stunning precisely because it veers wholeheartedly in the opposite direction. It’s the less-is-more of the new age — history as novelty — with scientists the makers, the form-identifiers, the paradigm-shifters. Scientists probe and manipulate and channel and divide; they split and fuse and spike and engineer; but most of all, they look. They are the keen observers of our future because they peer so deeply into our past. They are historians, anthropologists, archaeologists of the body, the mind, the air, the planet, the universe. As a visual maker, to spend any time at all with scientists is to become at once profoundly aware of our similarities and devastated by that which divides us. In an age that is likely to be remembered for its self-absorption, it is an extraordinary thing to witness a lab filled with people devoting themselves passionately to understanding what DNA looks like, or how the immune system behaves, or what infection means for a human being fighting for her life. It’s radical. It’s humbling. And if we don’t begin actively seeking new opportunities to learn, collaborate and contribute to this critical community of thinkers and doers, then we may have good reason to revisit that psychosis study.”