Bayou Texar Lecture Series Kicks Off with Famed Designer
by Jeremy Morrison, Inweekly
Franco Lodato’s well of inspiration runs deep, with the designer turning to the natural world all around him in an effort to incorporate the wonders of that natural world into his work. The nature of this work — called biomimicry — involves the contemplation of nature’s handiwork to inform man’s own, or as the designer explained, it’s a search for “all the different ways to implement nature’s principals and models to resolve manmade problems.”
“My expertise has been moving into analyzing deeply how nature organisms work — you know, to transfer that into something unique and useful,” Lodato said earlier this week.
Wednesday evening, Lodato will weave his field of expertise into a local issue: our relationship with our waterways, in particular, in this instance, with Bayou Texar. The Italian-American designer — boasting a portfolio of work with companies including Google, Motorola, DuPont, Coca-Cola, Ferrari-Maserati and Boeing — will be the first featured speaker in the Bayou Texar Frontier in Science Art & Design Virtual Seminar Series 2022.
This new lecture series focused on Bayou Texar is in conjunction with and an outgrowth of the Citizen Science Water Quality & Habitat Monitoring Network Project funded via the Pensacola & Perdido Bay Estuary Program and conducted by David Fries, a research scientist with the Institute for Human & Machine Cognition.
According to Fries, this lecture series is meant to incorporate various disciplines that can be related back to the local natural environment. In essence, he is viewing Bayou Texar — or any space, for that matter — as a frontier of science, and attempting to fuse disparate notions stemming from an array of backgrounds and disciplines into a larger conversation aimed at environmental improvements.
“Part of my thinking is, by starting a couple of interesting topics into the space, the space then has many different ways to appreciate it,” Fries explained the concept behind the lecture series. “There’s so many science topics that can be tied onto it: biological, design — which is what this first one is — chemistry, physics. Just pick any subject and you can then relate it back to the actual physical environment and that’s what I’m trying to do with these lectures, or this series of speakers.”
While this initial virtual lecture will feature Lodato, a renown designer, future engagements will include the artist Tez (August 24) and Cal-Tech astrophysicist George Djorgovski (July 14)., among other leaders in their respective fields. The series is slated to run in monthly installments through the end of the year, with presentations streamed live — beginning at 6 p.m. on youtube.com/c/SpiffWhitfield — and also available for viewing afterwards. Following each presentation, viewers will be able to pose questions to the speakers.
For the June installment of the series, Lodato will be discussing how the natural world inspires his work. According to the designer, he looks to nature in order to study relationships between various problems and their corresponding solutions.
“If you go backward, the biggest database is nature, correct? So, you always see something that is resolving a problem on any level. What we do is discover that,” Lodato explained. “So, I don’t believe in inventions. I believe in discoveries, you know? Because most of the different things that have been created by human beings are a replication, a mimic, of what nature has resolved.”
Put simply, the designer looks for how various elements of the natural world function — “How do fish swim? Why do octopuses change color?” — and then extrapolates his observations into projects and products designed to address a particular issue or problem.
“In my process, in any of the projects I have done, I always go and give the opportunity to identify how nature does that on that deep level and then try to put that into the reality of the thing that I’m working on,” the designer said.
Offering up a mid-20th Century, textbook example of such a concept, Lodato points to the advent of Velcro by Swiss engineer George de Mestral. Mestral drew inspiration for the hook-and-loop fasteners from observing seeds attaching themselves to the fur of his dog.
This type of work, Lodato said, requires an essential element: curiosity. This curiosity allows the observer to discover how the natural world addresses a particular issue and thus incorporate that finding into applicable projects. Ideally, this process opens the observer up to developing a useful implementation that is not only functional, but also elegant.
“At the end of the day it’s really about curiosity,” Lodato said. “There are simple ways to do things. You know, you can build a hammer by taking a stick and putting some weight on the side. But the reality is that there are more elegant ways to achieve, to resolve a simple hammer-situation problem. And when you look at nature, there are thousands of examples.”
Tying all of this back to Bayou Texar, Lodato’s presentation will stress the value of the local community’s relationship to the bayou and other waterways.
“There’s always a correlation of the systems, correct?” the designer pointed out. “There is a correlation between where you live, how you act and how you impact that environment.”
In observing the natural world and drawing inspiration from it — from its methods, its patterns, its designs — Lodato feels that we can incorporate the beauty of natural solutions into efforts to improve our relationships to the environment.
“There’s always an opportunity to try to implement and mimic nature’s wonders,” the designer said.
— To read more about the Bayou Texar Frontier in Science Art & Design Virtual Seminar Series, check out next week’s issue of Inweekly