Biomemética: Fred Gelli at TEDxSudeste

Hi, everyone. Good afternoon. First of all, I'd like to say it's an honor for me to be beside this brand.

Because nowadays I think it represents the blend between knowledge and experiences. From now on, we'll only find solutions if we have real disposition and energy focused on the direction of blending and sharing. I think this brand represents this in the world.

I'm going to tell you a bit about my story. I majored in Engineering at PUC for three weeks. I was lucky to quickly realize it wasn't what I wanted.

I had some friends who were majoring in Design at PUC, so I thought it made sense to mix the technical part, like math and physics, and art, both of which I liked. So I decided to major in Design, still considering it a bit of the stereotype everyone had of Design in the 80s. I thought I was going to learn how to design Ferraris, lamps and incredible chairs.

On the first day of class, I went to this classroom here. I didn't understand, because I expected to go to laboratories to design Ferraris. In the middle of the classroom, there was a bonfire.

My interest at the time, for my first project, was in packaging. I took some packages as references to my teacher, who was Ana Branco. She still teaches at PUC, in this same shed.

And she still is my guru in some way. I showed her the packages, and she asked me if I thought they were good references to start a project and if I had considered the package that brought me into the world. At the time, I didn't understand what she meant.

But then I realized it was a special opportunity to look at design in a different way, somewhat forgetting about the Ferraris, lamps and chairs. So I really got into this perspective of trying to understand how nature packed its things. I started consider nature as a designer.

Our planet's atmosphere is a very sophisticated package, the fruit's peel is a perfect reference. The tangerine, for example, has individual portions. It was actually a bionics project.

So, in 87, I realized I was getting involved in a field that had great potential, but was very unknown, and still is a bit unknown, but obvious. It's the idea of looking at nature and be inspired to apply it in engineering, architecture, design and medicine, or in any field of human knowledge. In this first project, I realized nature considers three principles when it's projecting or creating something.

The first principle is the optimization, the efficient point. Nature hates wastefulness. When we imagine a drop coming down a rock, the way it's taking is the optimal way.

If we could scan this way and create a mathematical equation for it, we would trace it. The second principle is the cycle principle. Everything in nature is ruled by cycles.

We have the tides, the sun and the moon cycles. "Nothing is created, nothing is lost, all is transformed. " We learn it in 4th grade and quickly forget.

And the third principle, which is very intuitive, is the principle of interdependence. Everything we do has consequences, which cause more consequences. It's a chain of actions and reactions.

Which is also something we learn in the 5th grade, and soon forget. That's where the problem lies. What we do and our presence in nature go against these three basic principles.

Us humans have an ambition, an attitude and a style that are not optimal, we are maximum. We love wasting things, we love excesses. We love to use material things all the time.

We consume a lot of energy. 426 thousand cell phones are thrown away daily in the US. It's an absurd figure and goes against this basic law.

There's another principle, which we adopted instead of the cycle principle, and it's the linear principle. We extract raw material from somewhere, produce things in factories, transport these things, we buy them, use them, then we throw them away in a magic place we invented known as a trash can. The problem is that trash is occupying space in a radical way, so there's no more space.

So the fact that we go against these three principles. . .

has somehow brought us to the complications we have. Capitalism is at a crossroad. We have to come up with solutions and new ways.

And what excites me about that is that it is a very creative challenge. We have to redesign our relationship logic with the physical world. And redesigning has a lot to do with design, naturally.

We have to deeply revise our lifestyle. So in an attempt to search for inspiration to come up with alternative ways. .

. At Tátil, we work trying to be strategic partners to the brands, trying to create new ways in different areas, so we thought it would be interesting to try and be inspired by the same nature a friend of mine and I had already looked at in 86, in our first year in college. I'm sorry, I forgot to mention the third principle, which is the fragmented perspective, the opposite of interdependence.

Nature acts in a interdependent way, and we see things in a fragmented way. It's the Cartesian way, which divided knowledge into different boxes and complicated our lives, because we miss the links and connections and make decisions that create problems we can't control. So we looked back at nature to try and be inspired by its sources, which exist for thousands of yeas.

It seems so obvious to me. Nature has developed and improved its projects for millions of years, which are available in a copyleft way. So you're only encouraged to copy from it.

And the projects are incredible, and they come in a complete sense. They're sustainable projects, with exuberant solutions in every way. The first project that appealed to me, was the one I got from reading "National Geographic".

I read an article that really surprised me. The flowers, as an idea, as a concept, is a very recent project in our planet. It's only 100 million years old.

If we imagine that plants have been around for about 3 billion years, and converted these 3 billion years into 1 year, the flowers would have only been conceptualized in the last 4 hours of the last day of the year. At the end of the article it said that nowadays 90% of all plants species in our planet use flowers in their reproduction. When I read this, I thought it was an excellent marketing case, and a spectacular design case behind this marketing case.

Imagine that you release a product at 8pm on December 31st, and by midnight, it's taken over 90% of the market. It was completely surprising to me, so I was intrigued and wanted to understand what was the incredible logic behind this great idea, this solution, this splendid design project. So I tried to understand what was there before the flowers.

In the pre-flowered vegetal kingdom, plants reproduced through spores, so the wind took a spore from a pine tree to another. And that represented wastefulness, because the spores ended up on the ground. Besides that, the asexual reproduction generated a low diversity.

So we imagined how nature's creators were briefed to come up with the flowers. One of them certainly thought they had to shake things up, that they had to find a way to generate diversity, because diversity strengthens life. Nature is always trying to create variations to a theme in our planet, so that no matter the scenario, even if there's a radical geological shift, someone is going to be fine.

The idea they had, which is genius, which represents what design is. . .

Even if we try our best, we are still nowhere near nature's designs. The most genius idea they had was to first create a sensorial trap to seduce and invite two actors which had nothing to do with plant reproduction, which were the birds and the insects. It was something that I didn't register well when I was younger.

To me, birds and insects had always been related to plant reproduction, not only in the last 4 hours of the last day of the year. By creating solutions that involve shapes, textures, colors, smell and taste, they were able to develop a revolutionary idea. Above all, the idea transformed a boring pine tree forest.

. . which also had a boring fauna.

. . I don't know if you know this, but the fauna that lives under a pine tree forest is a poor fauna because of its low diversity.

This is a post-flower forest, and this is a pre-flower forest. It is an innovation case, in its highest degree. It is a revolution, it is a revolutionary idea, an idea that changed the life in our planet.

It's funny to think about the fact that we wouldn't be here if the flowers hadn't been invented. Because without the flowers there would be no fruit, without fruit the ape wouldn’t have had fuel for its brain to grow, and we wouldn't be here. So what we understood with this project.

. . We studied various types of flowers, and their relationships with their "clients", seeing that design solutions were specific to each "client".

A flower that is pollinated by a moth has to be white because the moth only flies at night. We studied many examples and we use this at Tátil in our projects. When we create our sensorial traps, we use this knowledge.

This was our aim, but we also hit something else. We realized that, above all, the flowers wasn't a genius idea only for the investors, for who funded this. Of course they had an amazing profit because the number of plant species after the flowers' release grew radically, more than 8000%.

The flower had been a genius idea to benefit and revolutionize life as a whole. It was a business model in which everyone wins. We had to aim at this kind of business in the future.

We can't imagine that almost 4 billion people live with less than US$ 3 a day. We can't keep thinking that we can carry on living as citizens, as business people, architects, engineers, with the variety of people here, in this unbalanced way. We need to have a genius idea, as some of nature's ideas, to try and find a way where everyone wins.

So we decide to study John Nash's game theory. There is a film about him called "A Beautiful Mind". In the 50s, he studied a mathematic logic that has a certain magic to it.

So if a guy that makes 100 agrees to make 70, everyone wins. It's the mathematic magic. This logic is still not often used, we're still directed to make profits and be greedy.

So it's complicated. But the fact is that business like Google is an example of business where everyone wins. In a general sense, people use Google everyday.

Who here goggled something today? And it's still 8am. .

. And who paid anything to use Google? It's a new business logic.

Wikipedia is the same thing. Google revolutionized our access to information and has this win-win characteristic. The guys who invented it are billionaires, of course, but humanity takes advantage of this business, this idea.

After realizing that nature did business, we wanted to look further into it. So we decided to study bio-businesses. We had a partnership with Fundação Getúlio Vargas and together we analyzed coral reefs as businesses.

It's an ecosystem with an exchange in product, service, energy, matter, information. What is curious about coral reefs is that they only occupy 1% of the ocean's surface, but 50% of all fish species live around them. So when we looked at satellite pictures of coral reefs, I realized it was similar to something.

Actually, this is a metropolis and this is a coral reef. They have very similar structures. And this similarity exists because of the diversity, which is a basic logic in nature.

These environments are rich because of their diversity. The energy poured on a coral reef is metabolized by many species, transforming this energy in life. This also happens in a metropolis.

There is a series of structures. . .

The metropolis organizes itself in a way that metabolizes energy powerfully. Hence the similarity. The relationships are similar.

There are symbiotic relationships in coral reefs. The Zooxanthellae are algae that live in symbiosis, producing energy they capture through photosynthesis and pass it to the coral, which protects them. In a metropolis, there are hotels and restaurants, and the restaurants depend on the hotels' clients.

There are floating populations which just pass by corals e metropolis at specific times in a day. So we established comparisons which helped us to have insights of how this could be used to rethink the future in businesses and cities with this inspiration. Coral reefs, like any other ecosystem, are not easy.

There's a lot of competition. This crab, for example, uses two poisonous anemones as boxing gloves to defend itself. We bullet-proof our cars.

This next analogy is inquiring. The small fish in coral reefs use their lateral lines as a defense mechanism. It's a shiny line on the fish's body, which allow them to communicate with each other.

They have an instant mobile communication system, so they can group themselves like this, and defend themselves from predators. They form great masses of fish, and this is a defense mechanism. When I read about this, trying to understand this communication system, which is when a fish signals the direction it's taking to another fish, and so on.

So a shoal of fish, following each other, defend themselves from predators. This thing of following each other reminded me of something. It was Twitter.

The fact is that Twitter, with its Lei Seca page that everyone here uses, works as a weapon. So there are shoals of cars running away from police raids. I thought that if I had studied this case before, I could have invented Twitter.

I missed a great opportunity. But the greatest thing about all this is that ecosystems, such as coral reefs, mangroves and sequoia trees are organisms that have no loose ends. We have a metaphor for this, which is the Celtic knot, so everything that comes in is renewable and nothing comes out.

This would generate a diagram. If we were to analyze all flow sequences in an ecosystem such as a coral reef, the generic flow of energy input and residue output, which are used by other organisms, this would be the diagram. It's a closed cycle, with no loose ends.

When we think about a metropolis, it's the exact opposite. All ends are loose. We're going to have to use these natural references and rethink the way we do business, rethink the way we live in the cities.

I truly believe that nature is a source of inspiration of the highest level. I teach a Bionics class here at PUC and I try to make my students think about this. I hope you get curious enough to look further into this.

That's it. Thanks, everyone.