L.I.A. like Life Inspired Artefact

Lia's are without a single exception the most successful artefacts on the planet.

This may sound on the first sight like blown up, but you don't have to look no further than the source of inspiration for the increasingly addictive world wide web.

To come up with the conceptual idea of the world wide web it takes an inspiration from a spider web, which hangs "iggit" down from our ceiling when we go home. The web structure is not limited to the spider web only, it can also be found in the structure of the synapsis of the brain or the root of rhizomatic grass populations. We are all linked and connected like the spider to any part of the web and like every nerve to the brain.

As a matter of fact, the digital web is just a tiny micro entry point into the world of Lia's which could increasingly continue to dominate more and more the future of design and innovation - if applied consciously.

It is mind blowing when we quickly look through history what can be classified as Life Inspired Artefact. We got Da Vinci's airplane inspired by birds, we got Darwins evolution theory inspired by the tree, we got John Hollands computation inspired by the DNA, and Muhammad Ali's fighting strategy inspired by the butterfly and the bee.

"The first language and the first technology was not created by humans. It was created by primordial RNA molecules. Is there any possibility that an evolution process with the potential of leading to comparable results could be started in the memory of a computing machine?" - Nils Aall Barricelli

Immediately, the notion will arise that we have always been using Living Artefacts to get inspiration for Life Inspired Artefacts. This may be true for cultures like the Egypt's and the Maya, which were surrounded by living things, but in our modern urbanized culture, we have surely a limited source of inspiration.
One of my external reviews from Goldsmith University, Terry Rosenberg came up with the great thought:

"It bags the question what is not all this?"

Lias vary a lot in their level of imitation and abstraction roughly between 1 and 99 percent. 0 would be no life inspiration and 100 percent would be life itself. Today I was fascinated by a Lia example from Boston Dynamic, who created an abstraction of a dog that could run through the forest. That would be a Lia with a high degree of life inspiration.

Than another example of a Lia that an innovator recommended me to read is the book "The Starfish and the Spider". I was literally stunned when he showed me the book without knowing what I am doing. I saw it as a fate, because the idea behind the literature is so similar to what Laliaflia stands for in the field of design and innovation. The authors encourage organizations to be build up on the structure of a sea star instead of a tree to evolve better and to be more creative.



Life inspired design is as the author of Zoomorphic, Hugh Aldersey-Williams, said to me: "a huge and complex area, but the structure LA / LIA / FLIA is sound"
So the term Lia allows us to recognize in seconds a design that is build up on an inspiration from a living thing.
Ask yourself why is Facebook, Google, Apple, or Twitter so successful? Is it just the technology or the source of inspiration?

To find Non-Life Inspired Artefacts you don't have to look further than your actual surrounding. What inspired your bed, your door, your PC, your table, or even your business structure? The more the artefacts consist of simple shapes like circle, square ect, the more we can be sure they are based on our thoughts or simple mathematics.

When ever I see a seagull flighing over my head and in the next moment an airplane (as an easy example) I see the huge gap between what has been abstracted from the bird and what is still left. The seagull glides, turns and twists with so much elegance and so much superiority that you start to think that the airplane is designed like a bomb with two reference points, the starting and the end. What holds engineers up to divert behaviors and functions from the seagull?

If the two sensory innovations we abstracted have found their way subconscious through the camera and the telephone, we have to admit that the space for Flia's, Future Life Inspired Artefacts, is incredibly immense. Of course, material science, computation, and architecture have been practicing life inspired design for many decades, but not in the simple structure of Laliaflia.

Why is this important to mention? Well, when you want to create something and you have a well defined structure like Laliaflia, which is dynamic, you will get quicker to a result and you will be totally aware of what is possible.