I had the absolute pleasure of giving a talk at UXScotland last week with Stu Church on ‘Nature Inspired Innovation – Designing the Future by Using Lessons from the Past’.

The talk emerged from a pub conversation where we both realised we had been mulling over similar ideas and it was great to have a super smart collaborator to work with to bring it to life.

It’s about learning from natural systems and applying those lessons to help to answer challenging questions such as :

• How much should you innovate?
• How fast should you innovate?
• Why do products look so similar?
• Why might people not choose the most efficient designs?

I think it’s really valuable and enjoyable to look for answers to the problems we face in our work in unexpected places. This talk, if anything else, was a useful reminder that the answers are often hidden in plain sight!

Enjoy!