This woman is using biomimicry to make design & businesses sustainable

Meet Anjan Prakash, one of India's few biomimicry specialists. She is powering a movement to make companies conscious of how their design can grow and guiding them to explore a route via nature. "It is a very simple design discipline. Learning to design sustainably from nature. 99.99 pct organisms do the same." While the discipline of biomimicry is new, the ethos is not. "Our ancestors and indigenous communities long practises this and had a win win relationship with nature." But now across the world people are beginning to reconnect to nature, so long they are making their choices consciously, and use of resources carefully and are being aware of their limitations, then it is a movement towards achieving biomimicry and sustainable living.

She is powering a movement to make companies conscious of how their design and grow and guiding them to explore a route via nature.

Just how is technology playing a role in sustainability?

"It's already a boon. I am in Mumbai and doing a program in biomimicry from Arizona State University. And I travel to different habitats and apply the sustainable design tool to local situations and problems and get international feedback. Tech is the tool I am using."

Anjan Prakash On She The People

But even as the work is on among communities and habitats, how has India fared? Are corporations participating in sustainable designs? "I think SMEs deserve a tribute. For three reasons. One, they have grown up near nature, two it's cost effective to be sustainable in long run and third they know resources are limited and so they use it consciously."

After 16 years in advertising, she realized her way forward was in working at the intersection of Business, Design and Nature.

How are women key to sustainability in any habitat?

"If women whose voices have been suppressed for generations, if they come out and take up leadership roles and express and embody who they are - bring out those qualities of leadership on the side of cooperative behavior, working as a community etc - then those are behaviours associated with sustainability."

This woman is using biomimicry to make design & businesses sustainable

From Advertising to Biomimicry

After 16 years in advertising, she realized her way forward was in working at the intersection of Business, Design and Nature. A conservation program at the Durrell Wildlife Institute, volunteer work at the Marine National Park in Seychelles and several other projects later, her vision gained more clarity.

In 2015-2016, she decided to pursue her Masters of Science in Biomimicry with Arizona State University. Simultaneously, she was selected for the prestigious Biomimicry Professional Certification Program of 2016-2018. This is a two year in-person immersion where the Biomimicry Institute mentors a group of eighteen selected students from across the world to become leaders in the Biomimicry practice - the discipline that teaches how to find sustainable human design solutions for all disciplines by learning from and emulating Nature.

Currently she divides her time between being a Masters cum Professional Certification student and a Biomimicry Communicator & Facilitator.