Biomimicry NZ
Biomimicry New Zealand aims to introduce and spread innovative ideas and promote research excellence focused on bio-inspired design. It also embraces collaboration with industry partners to create a common ground for discussions. The interdisciplinary aspect of biomimetic design opens up opportunities where distinctive fields of knowledge can link to benefit from the mutual knowledge transfer.
Translating processes, functions, and behaviours of living organisms into building design can improve different aspects of building performance. Transformation of biological ideas to architectural principles can simply be implemented to change or inform a building form or incorporated in practical aspects of building design such as structure and function. With buildings being huge contributors to climate change, consideration of biomimetic design can promote energy savings while it could enhance thermal performance.
Biomimicry New Zealand introduces a design tool called ThBA that assists practitioners, building engineers, designers and architects in finding relevant inspirations in nature to design sustainable and energy-efficient buildings. Biomimicry NZ is a biomimetic hub for energy efficiency discussions in New Zealand where experts and practitioners exchange and share innovative nature-inspired design ideas.
To learn more about us, our projects, and recent research, and how to get involved, please visit our pages and contact us.
Meet Dr Negin Imani
Negin Imani achieved her PhD in sustainable architecture and building science from Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. During her PhD, she worked as a researcher in the Centre for Building Performance Research. Having a bachelor’s and a master’s degree in Architectural Engineering and an interest in biological science motivated her to pursue interdisciplinary research and to bridge the gap between architecture and biology.
For the last ten years, her research has been focused on biomimetic building design and her interests in the biological world have been reflected in her design projects. She has worked in practice as a senior architect in nationally reputable Architectural and Engineering Consulting Companies.
She was chief architect for many award-winning national and international architectural design competitions. She has been engaged with teaching and supervising research conducted by bachelor’s and master’s students since 2013.
Negin received several scholarships that enabled her to conduct research on bio-inspired building design. The scholarships were awarded by Victoria University of Wellington, Architectural Association, and IKIU. The latter was awarded to talented postgraduate students transferring from a research master’s to a doctoral degree with distinction.
Her contribution to the field of energy-efficient biomimetic building design has involved the development of a comprehensive thermo-bio-architectural framework for connecting the thermal performance requirements of a building to relevant biological solutions in a systematic way. To connect building energy performance to the biology side of the framework she also created a visualization component for the energy results, which provides users with the ability to drill down and narrow the thermal performance results to the specific thermal challenges in a building.