Imitation Is The Highest Form Of Flattery

Week 2 started off with a bit of a surprise for me. I was expecting to completely switch gears and jump into a new project but I was assigned to stick with the water/hourly/folding project. The direction of it seemed to be heading towards a dead end but the new set of people really reenergized the project and were able to shed some light on areas of improvement. The excess water use turned into a garden, which became the surface, and eventually turned into a green wall. After a lengthy, and sometimes intense, discussion there was a concept which emerged and really caught my attention: biomimicry. Imitating tried and true methods from nature could save us the trouble of having to start from scratch. I looked for cool examples of nature interacting with water and two things caught my eye - the Lotus Effect and the Stenocara Beetle from the Namib Desert in Africa. This beetle is able to survive in one of the most arid landscapes in the world with its unique shape. Its bumpy back allows dew to condense on it and a waxy coating sends the droplets down the troughs to its mouth.

This waxy coating is quite similar to the Lotus effect and got me thinking about superhydrophobic materials. With such a small amount of the water actually touching the surface, water flows much more freely. 

Combine these principles with a few wisely placed gates and you can allow or restrict the flow of water all over the surface. When you're making a green wall, the amount of water each plant is getting can be quite critical. Over do it and they drown, under do it and they won't grow, so smartly delivering the water can optimize the crop yield. The issue of folding still prevented me from using this as inspiration for the surface, however when you use the geological definition of folding: when one or a stack of originally flat or planar surfaces are bent or curved as a result of deformation, the project opened up to numerous possibilities. I set off to work to learn Maya or some other 3D modeling software but the time investment was going to be too much to model this complex of a surface so quickly. I did learn that the fluid modeling package with it is quite extensive and could be useful in the future if we go that direction. Since my group is meeting later tonight to discuss ideas a rough prototype should suffice. A little bit of chip board and duct tape can do pretty much anything:

Why reinvent the wheel when nature has already done so? After all, imitation is the highest form of flattery.