PROJECT THEO
Aerial game parks are typically created in natural environments such as conifer forests, and include zip lines and aerial ropes courses suitable for children and adults. A key focus of aerial game park operators is to respectfully showcase and advocate for the health of the natural world, ensuring that their game element placement and anchoring, as well as any construction or deconstruction efforts are highly sensitive to the natural environment leaving minimal to no impact.
In order to better understand what being ‘non-detrimental to the growth and health of living trees’ would require from us in interfacing with them by any new attachment approaches, we needed to investigate the problem space - in essence reviewing existing human methods of interfacing with living trees and their biological impacts.
While the Biomimicry Lab team was not able to find research specific to aerial game attachment methods and their impact on trees, we were able to find several strong analogies to provide us with insights around this interface to broaden the innovation team’s understanding.
Our research findings were summarized into the following areas:
The General Structure and Biological Processes of Trees.
Existing Types of Human Interactions with Living Trees and Their Impacts
Natural Phenomena Affecting Living Trees and Their Impacts.
A Tree’s Defense System.
Human Interventions in Tree Wound Response and Their Effectiveness.
General Conclusions.
PROJECT GOALS
Biomimicry Lab was brought in to conduct a biomimetic innovation process with the project goal being to help CLA generate a range of innovative, nature-inspired (biomimetic) ideas for the interactions between aerial game elements and the living trees they mount to.
As part of this process, Biomimicry Lab was also to investigate the biological impacts of existing methods of attachment with insights gained informing future attachment approaches such that they would be less likely to be detrimental to the growth and health of the trees being interfaced with.
While multiple tree species were considered, Douglas Fir was agreed as the baseline reference species for the project and and ideas generated.
BIOLOGICAL ATTACHMENT RESEARCH
The biological brainstorm involved three certified biomimics; Jo Fleming, Karen Allen and Dr. Tamsin Woolley-Barker brainstorming around which organisms from the natural world attach temporarily or permanently. While the biomimics were aware of many types of attachment in nature, their energy was focused only on those organisms and strategies that would be applicable to attaching to living trees and working within the constraints that tree trunks as attachment substrates have such as highly-variable surface roughness, variable girth, and shifting moisture levels. Attachment approaches like suction for example, were not considered.
DESIGN CHARETTE
Participants in the Design Charrette included architects and designers from CLA and engineers from CLA’s engineering partner RJC. The Charrette and working session was facilitated by Biomimicry Lab Ltd.’s Jo Fleming.
The goal of the Design Charrette, a single day event, was to generate 2 - 3 strong nature-inspired ideas for attaching aerial game elements to living trees - namely platforms and cable attachment approaches and features. As a possible outcome of the process one or more of those strong ideas could then be taken forward by CLA into concept development, engineering design, prototyping and testing - the next steps after Project Theo’s completion.
