Emulating Nature’s Strategies with Amanda Sturgeon
How biophilic design can remember what the modern world forgot.
Amanda Sturgeon is CEO of the Biomimicry Institute, where she brings decades of experience at the intersection of architecture, sustainability, and nature-based design. Since stepping into the role in 2023, Amanda has helped guide the Institute’s mission to make nature’s wisdom accessible to designers, educators, and changemakers around the world.
A trained architect and longtime advocate for biophilic design, Amanda is known for championing built environments that deepen our connection to the natural world. Her work is rooted in the belief that nature offers not only elegant design principles, but a framework for healing our relationship with the Earth. Through her leadership, the Institute continues to expand its reach—offering resources like AskNature.org, which exists to inspire and guide people to develop regenerative solutions for pressing issues by drawing inspiration from the natural world.
Today, Earth Day 2025, marks 20 years for the Biomimicry Institute—a milestone in its commitment to reshaping how we live, build, and solve problems by turning to the intelligence of the natural world. Through its work in education, innovation, and global practice, the Biomimicry Institute has become a guiding force in demonstrating how nature’s patterns and principles can inform regenerative design and systems thinking.
Biomimicry is the practice of learning from and emulating nature’s strategies to address human challenges—a methodology that holds both the wisdom of life and the responsibility of choice.
In the following interview, Amanda Sturgeon reflects on her path from biophilic architecture to leading the Biomimicry Institute, and how reconnecting people with nature—through design, function, and place—can transform not just buildings, but the systems we live within.
The following interview has been transcribed from audio, with some revised sections.
INL: Your journey started in architecture, where you became known for championing biophilic design. What drew you toward nature-integrated spaces—and how did that evolve into a deeper exploration of biomimicry?
Amanda: Yeah, good question. I started my journey into the relationship between people and nature in my architecture work and practice, and that really started when I was an architecture student, to be honest. I spent a lot of time traveling, backpacking around Australia and elsewhere, and really getting used to being outside most of the time.
When it came to studying and working and spending time inside, it just, for me, intuitively, I craved spaces and buildings that had more connection to outside. I craved the spaces that didn’t cut you off—where you were still able to get a sense of seasons and weather patterns during the day, and the smells of nature that create a calming, peaceful sense of life.
I craved the spaces that didn’t cut you off—where you were still able to get a sense of seasons and weather patterns during the day, and the smells of nature that create a calming, peaceful sense of life.
That became really integrated into my studies as an architecture student and then my work as an architect from the very beginning. I graduated from my master’s in architecture in 1998 and was then living in Seattle. Right as I graduated, I came across Janine Benyus’ book Biomimicry1 that same year, and so I actually asked her to do a talk in Seattle. I was convening the conversation at the American Institute of Architects Seattle chapter and met her—so I met her in 1999. The book Biomimicry and this learning from nature, deep connection to nature to guide our lives, was the path that I was already on and exploring in the design space.
Biomimicry is something that really influenced me as an architect, and it’s morphed into a bit more of a focus on biophilia and biophilic design because it’s always been a bit tricky: how do we integrate biomimicry at a learning and species level into a building design? We've seen some great examples of it happening, but it's difficult in a normal architecture process to know the deeper biology of species and to spend that time, unfortunately, understanding the biology.
My focus became more on how to bring that connection, that reconnection between people and nature into buildings through biophilic design. That was really focused on bringing nature into the building, the building being influenced by its place in its design and creation. Then also looking at the finished building and how it reflects back into its ecosystem, with less focus on the species level—how do we learn specifically from an element like a feather or a skeletal structure?
It’s probably a rare architecture project, one of those boutique, high-end, once-in-a-10-year projects, that’s going to be able to create a form like a feather or really have that sort of creativity. In most architecture projects, there’s a much more linear process. The process of making buildings hasn’t changed for a very long time. It’s quite fragmented. It’s quite siloed. It’s very risk-averse. There’s a lot of insurance and investment involved. It’s not often the creative playground that you would want it to be to have those explorations.
The focus became more on biophilic design—how do you create the space itself that can physically connect someone, whether that be through just better daylight and ventilation? It became a bit astonishing to me as I got into architecture practice, that even just to fight for operable windows or natural daylight was a big thing. Buildings, again for efficiency, have become big, large squares with dark spaces in the center of them. We have become quite distant from the idea of living with the natural elements of our space, of our place.
That alone was a big fight, unfortunately, in architecture—just to get light and ventilation and natural materials and connection to ecology and just get a building oriented correctly so that it’s shaded from the sun in the afternoon and doesn’t have walls of glass facing the sun all day and creating an untenable space for its occupants. Architecture has become so distant from the sense of what it’s actually like to be in this space when you're in the context of this climate.
There has become, in the period of time that I was an architect especially, this sense that you can build any style anywhere—a glazed box in the middle of the tropics and just air condition it, or a treehouse in a cold climate.
It’s been a journey with biophilic design, that reconnection in architecture, just to get the basic principles of living with a place to the forefront.
My journey now, towards the Biomimicry Institute a year and a half ago, I think I’m still sitting with that question of how does biomimicry really influence the ways that we create our shelters and create our cities and places? That’s an exploration I’m keen to go on in the next year and a collaboration that we’re looking to create. I’m keen to understand that more. I think it’s going to be a lifelong—and beyond my life—journey to see how we can, if you like, write our relationship with the places that we build.
INL: For those new to these ideas, how do you distinguish between biomimicry and biophilic design—and how does each uniquely invite us to reimagine about the way we live and design?
Amanda: Well, I see them as both part of the reconnect, reawakening journey. They're both part of the deepening of our knowledge and awareness around the connection between people and nature. In that way, I think they share the same foundation. The reconnect objective of biomimicry, the reconnect objective of biophilic design—I see as very much the same. The methods by which they then sort of divert to achieve that are different. Biophilic design is very much about the physicality of the building space, how it's connecting directly just to fresh air, daylight, sounds outside, climate. To be able to have any view to nature from a building, the idea of bringing in natural materials, water, fire, green walls—you name it—just being able to have those connections to natural forms and systems.
It's not going as deep as biomimicry, where you're actually then looking at the species level, and you're really understanding the functions of that species and how you might mimic them. Not to say there haven't been buildings that have brought that in. I mean, the classic one is the termite mound, but really buildings have been using the flow of hot air rising to ventilate them for centuries and centuries. It's not just looking at the termite mound that's influencing that. It's just physics, and it's good ventilation for a space. It's been used for thousands and thousands of years.
The idea that you can start looking at more detailed species and learning from them around how they might create shelter and start to mimic that in a building can also be part of biophilic design. That's where I think they cross over in their strategies. But some strategies of biophilic design, like just having access to the windows—I wouldn't call that very biomimetic. I would call that just really about reconnecting people by allowing them to have some access [to nature].
They're part of the same foundation, but they manifest a little differently. I would like to see them bridged a lot more closely. The potential for biomimicry to influence building design is really nascent and has a lot of opportunity to be blown out further. To really set a framing for what biophilic design could achieve is an opportunity to bring more biomimetic approaches.
More recently as well, our sister organization, Biomimicry 3.8, has been convening around ecosystem services mimicking. So, how can you look at the ecosystem services of a place, and how can the building then be part of providing those services, even though you're putting a building in there? How can the building help to clean water for that watershed, or generate energy through solar? How can it start to mimic those ecosystem services as a space—that's something they've been exploring. I think being able to think about biomimicry beyond just a species or a specimen set of learning opportunities, to what’s an ecosystem, has more opportunity for integration between buildings and biophilic design and biomimicry.
They're connected, but they take slightly different forms is what I would say.
INL: Indigenous cultures have long embodied the principles of biomimicry in their relationship with nature. How can we honor and integrate this knowledge in contemporary design, ensuring it’s respected and not appropriated?
Amanda: It's a good question. It's something that we've started exploring. We have a fantastic site, AskNature, that looks at different lessons from nature—nature's genius—and shows how we could learn from that knowledge and translate it into the things we make, or spaces we create, and the way we live our lives. We're increasingly interested in then, well, how do we bridge that—or braid, if you like—that sort of more Western science learning with traditional ecological knowledge? We have started a bit of a journey to figure that out, in conjunction with a couple of our Indigenous board members.
There's some fantastic work that people are doing around surfacing traditional ecological knowledge. We would love to play a role at the Institute around surfacing and braiding that together with Indigenous communities. We put out a few funding proposals to do it in collaboration with some Indigenous organizations that we haven't quite hit yet. But we would love to find some support to do some of that braiding through the AskNature platform and start to bring that knowledge more to the forefront and play the small role that we could to help with that.
It's critical to our work. We have focused much more on Western science and biology, and we have an acknowledgement that it's pretty important for us to also embrace traditional ecological knowledge.
INL: Which living systems or species do you find yourself returning to again and again for inspiration in design?
Amanda: I'm very place-based, so in my design career, I was very much focused on really listening closely to what that place—I guess what that place “offers” isn't quite the right word, but what that place's gifts or specific nuances are, and responding in design specifically to that place. Really taking the time to understand it, to listen, to learn—if possible, to connect with Indigenous communities—to understand it deeper over time, and to respond to that whole journey of learning. I don't think I've ever really focused on, "Okay, I'm going to learn from this one species and see how I can apply it to a design somewhere else."
For me, design work has to be very place-based and very focused on a unique solution that could only be there—both from the ecology of that place, and also from the cultural and community references of that place. I think it's always been a bit more intertwined.
I have worked on projects that have taken influence from more of a meadow-type of space that's really more open and bright and has more gathering space. Or I've also created spaces that are more inward, or more forest-like, dependent on what that place is calling for. For me, the influence has to come very deeply from the place or the region and understanding it, versus the species level. But that's because I was responsible for designing buildings.
With our Ray of Hope2 program at the Institute, those that are designing new products—such as new ways to have fabrics, or new ways to think about concrete or the way that we make color—learning from nature is incredibly powerful at the species level. Because, yeah, "How would nature do that?" is the question they're always asking.
Definitely at the product level, and even at the social system and leadership level, it can be incredibly helpful to say, "How would nature lead? How would nature lead us through a period of chaos or a period of intense change?" What does that look like in natural systems? How can we learn from natural systems for how they might adapt to that? I feel like nature's always teaching us something, but for building design, I feel like it's always got to be place-related.
INL: Can you share a few examples where organizations or designers have successfully integrated biomimetic design to create more efficient, regenerative systems?
Amanda: Yeah, I can start at the product level. I think biomimicry is a bit more known for the products, partly probably because the Ray of Hope program we've had has been really successful.
Some of my favorite examples on the product side are those that use structural color, and we've got quite a few. We're now calling it a platform of technologies—changing the way we do color. Our extraction of dyes and minerals to make color, whether that be for clothing, paints, makeup, or anything that has color, is incredibly destructive from the fossil fuel processing perspective, from a mining perspective, and from a toxicity perspective.
Several companies have figured out how to learn from iridescence in nature—from beetles and hummingbirds and how they create it—and figured out that it's actually just a spiraling of the cellulose structure on the surface of their shell or feathers that creates the color. We've been able to replicate that using waste cellulose, without the toxicity of mining and pollution, to just create great color. I think that's one of my favorites because it eliminates entirely this incredibly destructive process. It's so simple and can be applied anywhere, using waste as its resource. That's one of my favorite examples at the product or manufacturing systems level.
From a building design perspective, there have been some grandiose examples—those that are able to have the flexibility or be like a passion project that can be more sculptural in form and have mimicked structures in nature. While I love those and think they're really exciting, I think at the building scale I'm more influenced by projects where they're not the feature. The connection you would find as an occupant between you and the natural environment is actually the feature. Providing that clear space for that reconnection to happen, and that reawakening to happen through the sequencing of spaces, through the really subtle, multi-sensory abilities that are mimicked from the place. I featured quite a lot of those in my book some years ago, Creating Biophilic Buildings. I looked at 14 different projects, and I think all of those are my favorites—probably all of them—because they do it in different ways.
The idea of having central focal points to bring people together, which is something you see in natural systems a lot. The ability to have exploration and awe and wonder—those sorts of experiences that you have in nature—and to be able to manifest those in spaces. I think that's always my favorite kind of example.
Then I think at the larger-scale ecosystem or city level, there are so many fantastic initiatives. I worked on a project called Nature Positive Sydney that looked at what it would take to really create a nature-positive city, where we are reawakening that connection between people and nature and really thinking about the city as a series of ecosystems that support biodiversity.
I think my examples are probably much more place-based. I like to look at all three scales—the products and the different way of doing things, through to buildings, and then through to cities and infrastructure, and how we can actually scale it across systems.
INL: AskNature.org opens a window into how natural systems solve challenges. Take us inside—how does it shift the way people think about design or innovation?
Amanda: AskNature provides the ability to search for solutions and ideas from nature—to solve challenges we might be facing, whether that be how nature would design a road differently, all the way through to how nature would adhere to things or create color.
It's got a function where you can ask those questions, and it will show you examples from nature. It will also show you where there's been some innovations using that genius from nature.
In the structural color example, there are several examples of innovations from the Ray of Hope program that we run, and you can then dive into those deeper. There are a few layers of depth with AskNature. You can just be inspired by the amazing genius of nature, or you can start to understand how you could then translate that into a solution.
People can engage with it in terms of looking to explore how they might start an innovation themselves, explore how they might solve a design challenge that they have if they're a designer, or look at how they can improve a product or process they already have in play. We find that people are using it across education, all the way through to research and development of products and systems.
We will be launching in a few months the ChatNature feature, which will be even more robust than what you see on AskNature now. It will enable you to have a conversation with nature about how it would do something, so people can look for that emerging in the next couple of months.
INL: What might it look like to apply biomimicry to governance? Are there natural systems—like forests, watersheds, or mycelial networks—that can guide how we organize, make decisions, or share power?
Amanda: Increasingly, we're also looking to nature for how we would change our society. How would we look to—a popular reference—mycelium structures, and how would mycelium teach us about connectivity between each other and how we might create organizational structures?
There's the ability to look at social innovation, if you like, through learning from nature and rethinking how we might adapt in times of crises, and also looking at how we might lead differently. How does nature adapt, lead, change?
There are infinite lessons there for us in terms of rethinking our civilization as we go through significant changes in the next decade or two due to climate change and biodiversity loss. It's really about what questions do we want to ask, how curious are we, and what is our willingness to shift the way we currently do things?
INL: We often use biomimicry as an example application of Natural Law. As someone who has dedicated your life to biophilic design principles, what does Natural Law mean to you?
Amanda: Well, for me, it means letting nature lead and giving nature the space to be a decision maker— and to be at the table. And for us to reshape and quiet our own ego, to be able to be more eco-led.
What would nature do?
I think that question, the question that biomimicry asks, provides us a space to put nature law into action. And if you like, I think AskNature also provides a platform for us to be able to understand a bit more—what would natural law look like? How do we ask nature that question, to be continually learning from nature's systems? That's what it means to me.
We've engaged a bit with a project—the More Than Human Rights project at New York University. We are exploring the space of: if we use, for example, intelligence from nature, knowledge from nature, how might we compensate nature for that?
How might we make sure that as a result—not just in terms of a bioeconomy3 that's using nature—but if we're using nature's intelligence and knowledge, how might we be able to, if we profit from that, make sure that that ecosystem is compensated and taken care of?
We have been exploring a little bit around that in biomimicry. It's a fairly new space for us to think about—how can we bring our 25 years of knowledge of looking to nature for answers to a different, more than human rights perspective? It's something we've been exploring, but it's a fairly new space for the Biomimicry Institute. So, we'd love to learn more.
INL: What do you see as the next big challenge or opportunity for biomimicry in the next decade, and how can we move beyond just identifying nature's brilliance to actually implementing it on a systemic scale?
Amanda: One key thing for the Biomimicry Institute in this marking of 20 years is that the groundwork's been built to show that biomimicry, if you like, as a practice, has value in solving some of our critical challenges over the last 20 years.
Now, the question that we're looking to answer is: how do we bring that way into action, especially in the disruption that's needed to move to new paradigms? There's a wealth of knowledge and learning that we've gathered, just around nature's brilliance, but also, then, how do you translate that to reawaken this knowledge?
There's the potential for it to really be integrated across all of these sorts of explorations—in the regenerative space, in the nature-positive space, in the modern human rights space. To have that deep learning from nature be a key component or a foundation of that work and to inform it.
Because I do see a “charging off” sometimes in the new paradigm creation space of thinking about it only as people and not bringing nature's voice or nature's learning—what would nature do—to the table? That's something that we can offer as an institute to some of these emerging movements and new paradigm spaces.
It's been a great 20-year journey of truly showing that this practice has value. Now the question is: how does it get enacted at a larger, more systemic level?
You can learn more about Amanda Sturgeon here, the Biomimicry Institute here, AskNature here, and find Amanda’s book Creating Biophilic Buildings here.
Biomimicry (book), by Janine Benyus, Innovation Inspired by Nature, explores nature as model, measure, and mentor to solve human challenges through the wisdom of 3.8 billion years of evolution.
The Ray of Hope Accelerator supports nature-inspired solutions addressing the world's biggest environmental and social challenges.
Bioeconomy is a regenerative economic model that uses nature-based resources and innovations to support human and ecological well-being.
"What would nature do?" is a fascinating question. Intuitively, my perspective has always been that Nature will protect herself. There are thresholds of tolerance that the human species is close to exceeding. Nature survives—always. That may not be a good look for most of the human species.