I was approached by a friend of mine about the subject of artificial waves breaking over artificial reefs. The lens being creation of such a structure in open (deep) water.
As we slowly examined the concept and looked at both naturally occurring as well as man made systems, I had a few thoughts:
I have long wondered about something.
Is it prudent to strictly mimic nature, in creation of design?
Or would we be more successful in an endeavor to approach that new design concept by taking the organic concept, and add our own input to the design?
This is my reasoning. We are a product of natural order and progression-evolutionary response, though maybe Evo is not the most accurate term.
Shouldn’t we add-create? Rather than mimic? Would not that be what we are ordained to do on this earth?
Of course mimicry is safer. We know it works.
Sometimes mimicry is a necessary starting point. Then adding variables starts to occur. This is caused by a number of factors: boredom, young people identifying with a change and making it “their own”, taking something to an extreme, serendipity. It almost always is a non-linear event, and usually a combination of methods, equipment and especially concepts from a field outside the field it will change. Totally “new” is rare, but new combinations of old things can jolt an endeavour forward suddenly. So become interested in EVERYTHING, not necessarily facts or technologies, but the concepts that underlie them.
What would happen say if we sped up Kelly Slater’s wave 3 times as fast? What kind of boards (or skiis, or wings or…?) would we need to develop? How would we ride them? Could we ride above them kind of like pelicans using aeronautic “ground effects”?