The Legacy of Professor Luigi Colani
«After all, man has only had technology for 200 years. Nature has been solving problems in a highly sophisticated way for billions of years.»
Already his father advised the young Colani in his youth to look for answers in nature. His parents raised him to be creative at a very early age. They did not give him any toys, but set up a craft room for him to build his own toys. «My parents […] tinkered for me. They were both very talented workers with their hands. I was the only schoolchild in the world who ran home after school to tinker with them. » By the age of four, the young Colani could already solder and made his planes, ships and cars out of various materials, whether wood, iron, plaster or clay. «I was a gifted little sculptor by the time I was five.»
«I asked questions and nature answered me – 90% nature and only 10% inspiration Colani.»
In 1971 Colani published his manifesto for new, biomorphic forms of design in all areas of society. It bears the name Ylem. Ylem means the original substance from which all matter is formed. On 120 loose sheets of paper, he unfolded, primarily in drawings, his ideas for a more humane society that recognizes the laws of nature, learns from nature and must live in harmony with it in order to protect it and thus itself. The most beautiful thing is nature.
Until old age, Professor Luigi Colani remained a highly productive creator of novel shapes and many patents modeled on nature. In 2017, Professor Luigi Colani laid the foundation for safeguarding and disseminating the causal knowledge of protecting nature systemically with his bequest to the BioDesign Foundation.
BioDesign – The Concept
«BioDesign is no longer just a design language, but a lifestyle.»
Challenge
The rapid population growth and the global growth of conventional economic activity with its increasingly serious ecological effects make the reflection of economic activity urgently necessary. Our way of doing business is the cause of natural degradation.Value creation and prosperity are created by companies. All objects/products are produced by companies and bought by everyone. Products are always material from nature. In every product manufacturing there is an essential sustainable solution contribution, e.g. in nature-friendly (re)use of materials, longevity, lean logistics, energy efficiency. This is the path of BioDesign.
Everyone contributes to ecological interventions in nature with their lifestyle, consumption and savings. With every flow of money, everyone influences someone (usually companies) to do something. Tying a sustainable demand to the flow of money is a democratic vote that everyone is responsible for. To whom do I give my money? Do I buy sustainable products or others?
In the knowledge to this question lies the responsibility and the potential of everyone to promote sustainable management and consumption, thus protecting nature and living better and healthier. BioDesign is the vision that gets as many people as possible excited about systemic change as causal conservation.
Solution
Nature-friendly management and a valuable lifestyle are the solutions for causal nature conservation.
1. nature-friendly management
BioDesign incorporates natural conditions into business operations. Products are holistically planned in advance:
1. functional requirements/product design
2. material planning
3. energy planning
4. manufacturing
5. distribution/logistics
6. use planning and communication
7. recycling into the economic cycle.
Natural materials are claimed in all six steps. There is learning from nature in all six steps (materials/substances/recycling, function, design, beauty). Natural laws and their best solutions are brought into the product design process. The impact on nature is kept to a minimum. – Let’s make competitive products!
BioDesign is holistic economic thinking.
2. Valuable Lifestyle
BioDesign products are valuable, durable, healthy and beautiful. Why buy other products?
A product should fit individually as well as be beautiful, healthy and a faithful, chosen companion. Products are always natural material and were made by people. – Let’s choose the best products from the best manufacturers!
BioDesign is an attitude for conscious consumption and a smart, healthy lifestyle.
BioDesign is the architecture for an ecologically sustainable life. Born in the understanding of the sustainable and market-effective production process, BioDesign as a whole concerns the use of materials, surfaces, air, water, plants, fungi and animals, and thus the adjustment between the use and the preservation of nature. The ecological data make it increasingly clear that we have been managing to the detriment of nature and thus existentially against ourselves.
BioDesign brings knowledge of nature into economic activity (production, consumption and saving) and into people’s lifestyle. The way of doing business dominates the global social systems. In BioDesign lies the key and the causal contribution for the necessary transformation of our society on the way to a sustainable social system.
Action
Sustainability is the new cool!
The BioDesign Foundation stands for the imprinting, further scientific elaboration and dissemination of BioDesign. In order to achieve maximum impact in the economic markets, we work for the maximum dissemination of BioDesign: through awareness raising, public relations, knowledge transfer, university education, lobbying and with practical solutions of exemplary BioDesign products and methods as well as a variety of different projects and actions of our movement of Custodians.
BioDesign brings nature-friendly economy and valuable lifestyle. A didactic-factual rebellion against our normality of destructive behavior.
Abstract – Our Signé
Knowledge of nature in the social system
In our signé, we have created an abstract tracing of the perfect shapes of the individual shell chambers of the nautilus (cephalopod in the Pacific and Indian Oceans, an animal species up to 60 million years old). Leonardo Fibonacci, one of the most important mathematicians of the Middle Ages, studied numerous growth processes in nature and deduced uniform growth patterns that apply in nature, including the universe: among other things, the reproduction of animal and plant species as well as the creation of the nautilus shell chambers, which became known as the “Fibonacci spiral”.
Albert Einstein adopted Fibonacci’s findings and applied them to the discovery or calculation of black holes. The Fibonacci sequence is also related to the so-called Golden Section, which produces an objective beauty (disputed) in the design of proportions of various objects. Today it is an integral part of higher mathematics and astronomy. A systemic effective logic of nature, showing its beauty and perfect functionality – BioDesign.