Food. It's not just the way we fuel our bodies,but perhaps the most intimate way we interact with our environment. Everything we eat comes from nature and begins as something growing on land or at sea. While our food is rooted in a vast chain of ecological relationships, it's also part of an increasingly complex and problematic system of our own design. It's a system that has resulted in depleted soils, landfills full of packaging waste and uneaten food, and dependence on expensive inputs, like chemical fertilizers—all while nearly 1 billion people go hungry every day. From seed (or sea) to table and everywhere in between, there's a lot we need to improve.
The good news is that healthy ecosystems are models of abundance, fertility, and resiliency, and taking cues from nature can help us make the improvements we need. Whether addressing waste, growing methods, pest management, packaging, preservation and distribution, soil quality, or a changing climate, nature offers innumerable strategies for solving issues around food and agriculture in innovative ways. And nature does so while supporting biodiversity and minimizing water use, energy use, and waste.
• Identify and solve a specific problem within the food system.
• Intentionally emulate one or more mechanisms, processes, patterns, or systems found in nature.
• Enhance the sustainability of the food system, whether from an environmental, social, or economic perspective—or ideally all three.
What you choose to focus on within the broad category of the "Food System" is up to you. If you don't already have a design opportunity in mind, the Reference Collection below can help your team narrow this broad challenge into a specific design problem—one with potential for impact and at a scope and scale that is feasible for your team. We suggest beginning with the resource "Start Here: Suggestions for the 2015-16 Food Systems Challenge.
In all cases teams should become familiar with and apply the core concepts and methods of biomimicry, as featured in the Learn Biomimicry section of our website. How well your design concept emulates nature and how well your entry exhibits a biomimicry design process are both significant factors during judging.
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