I think it might be appropriate to allow Hugh Aldersey-Williams to finish his point. He also wrote in the next section:
“Like Gulliver, we return from Lilliput and Brobdinang only to find that some of the strangest goings-on are happening at the human scale. There is a case to be made that, for all their unanswered questions, it is the very large and the very small that are best understood by science. The middle of the range, the mesoscale, offers plenty of mysteries yet.
…The mesocale is where matter and energy behave in the ways intuitively familiar to us, where visualization is most relevant, and therefore where it is most likely that designers have a real contribution to make.
…All of biology happens at this scale.
…If tissue cells can be cultured to emulate human parts for use in reconstructive surgery, some designers have reasoned, then they can aslo be made to follow entirely novel forms.
…It is altogether harder, in these early days, to produce a thing of beauty.
…Other designers are taking their ideas from nature but executing them in artificial materials. Here is where nanotechnology and biosciences - apparently so different both in scale and in what one might call their romance - actually overlap.
…Such objects are evidence of a shift away from the machine and toward organism as cultural metaphor.
…One of design’s greatest problems, often ignored completely, is that of matching a product to its use not in the physical three dimensions of space, but over time.
…In nature, this problem is deviously solved by death: an organism dies once it ceases to have a use and ceases to have a use after it dies. A prime goal for designers now has to be to bring their objects’ material existence and practical utility into similar harmony. One might counter that nature is wasteful in its own way, cruelly redundant in its overproduction of species that merely become another species’ prey. But this is only wasteful from the species’ point of view: Nature’s concern is for the most economical management of the overall system. A comprehensive biomimetic design philosophy will require systems thinking a mile away from the designer’s traditional focus on the object.
This approach to design seeks to adapt specific advantages observed in natural organisms into human technology, but the polemical subtext of any design inspired by nature is that we are in danger of losing touch with the natural world. It’s pleads for the biological, the technological, and the ethical to come together. This is the objective of “consilience,” the term coined by biologist Edward O. Wilson for the reunification of the strands of intellectual inquiry artificially separated as a consequence of the growth of specialized disciplines in science and the humanities. In his book, ‘Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge’, Wilson writes: “If the world really works in a way so as to encourage the consilience of knowledge, I believe the enterprise of culture will eventually fall out into science, by which I mean the natural sciences, and the humanities, particularly the creative arts.”
Charles Eames and Richard Feynman were consilient personalities, but their meeting never happened because the world didn’t work in the right way. The question is: Does it now?”