Feral by Design | The Biomimicry Podcast

What happens when you give someone a way of looking, without telling them what to find?

Pia takes one small part of her octopus-inspired innovation method out of the office and sends it on holiday to Zimbabwe with her friend Jane.

The experiment starts at Eastgate Centre in Harare, the termite-inspired building from the previous episode. Jane gets one loose lens: How does this place feel? What can you hear? What do you notice? What surprises you?

Then Pia gets out of the way.

What begins as a visit to a biomimicry landmark somehow turns into termite-mound excursions, sunset drinks on top of one, an unofficial Zimbabwe branch of Feral. And a safari where termite mounds become surprisingly competitive with lions.

Underneath the fun is an experiment in attention: how a simple lens can change what we notice, what we follow and even what the people around us start seeing.

A story about biomimicry, octopus intelligence, distributed sensing, curiosity - and what can happen when you direct attention without prescribing the answer.

Partner episode: How Termites Taught a Building to Keep Cool (Eastgate Centre)
Original method episode: The Octopus Method: Octopus Intelligence When You're the Bottleneck 

Nature owns the patent. We get to copy it.

S3E07

Send Pia a note

Follow Feral for new episodes every fortnight.

Instagram / Facebook / YouTube : @feralbydesignpod

feralbydesign.com

Created and hosted by Pia Williams
Clever by Nature. Feral by Design.

Eastgate Centre in Harare, Zimbabwe, is one of biomimicry’s most famous buildings. Designed by architect Mick Pearce and inspired by termite mounds, its passive cooling system uses around 90% less energy for heating and cooling than comparable conventionally air-conditioned buildings.

Thirty years later, Feral went inside.

Our first roving correspondent, Jane, went into Eastgate to find out what this famous piece of termite-inspired architecture actually feels like today, how its passive cooling works, and whether the story we’ve been telling about Eastgate for 30 years still holds up.

She found cold air, 48 chimneys, cactus-inspired surfaces, a touch of The Matrix, some strangely empty upper floors... and a termite story that science has made considerably more interesting since Eastgate was built.

Eastgate engineering functionality still works as designed. But our understanding of the biology moved on.

A story about Eastgate Centre, termite-inspired architecture, passive cooling, biomimicry and a deceptively useful question: what’s already here that I could use instead of fight?

Next episode: Jane takes the Octopus Method into the wilds of Africa. Listen to S1E04, The Octopus Method, first if you can.

Sources
Mick Pearce — Eastgate Centre project page: https://www.mickpearce.com/Eastgate.html

Arup — The Arup Journal, 50th Anniversary Issue: https://www.arup.com/globalassets/downloads/arup-journal/the-arup-journal-50th-anniversary-issue.pdf

Hidden Architecture — Eastgate Centre: https://hiddenarchitecture.net/eastgate-centre/

Nautilus — "The Termite and the Architect": https://nautil.us/the-termite-and-the-architect-234706

ASME — "What Termites Can Teach Engineers" by Mark Wolverton: https://www.asme.org/topics-resources/content/what-termites-can-teach-engineers

King, H., Ocko, S. & Mahadevan, L. (2015), "Termite mounds harness diurnal temperature oscillations for ventilation," PNAS

Grist — cactus-inspired façade design (Jane C. Hu)

Knight Frank Zimbabwe — Harare CBD office vacancy data

S3E06

Send Pia a note

Follow Feral for new episodes every fortnight.

Instagram / Facebook / YouTube : @feralbydesignpod

feralbydesign.com

Created and hosted by Pia Williams
Clever by Nature. Feral by Design.

Last week, we looked at the biology behind GLP-1 medicines like Ozempic and Wegovy. This revisited Season 1 episode looks at the other half of that moment: the needle itself.

Mosquito mouthparts have inspired researchers and designers working on less painful needle technology, microneedles and medical devices. Their six-part feeding system works very differently from a conventional needle, using multiple tiny structures together rather than one blunt puncture.

When you were a kid, did you ever get jabbed with a needle so big it felt like a medieval weapon? I did, the kind that left welts and trauma in equal measure.

Turns out, the real master of painless penetration was buzzing around my head the whole time.

This episode of Feral by Design explores how mosquito mouthparts inspired biomimicry researchers to rethink needle design, pain, precision and the way we deliver medicine.

It’s a classic biomimicry story: brute force versus elegance, one sharp object versus a coordinated six-part system, and why one of the world’s most annoying insects might deserve a tiny nod of respect before you swat it.

This is a revisited Season 1 episode with a new introduction pairing it with Ozempic’s Secret Weapon.

S3E05A

Send Pia a note

Follow Feral for new episodes every fortnight.

Instagram / Facebook / YouTube : @feralbydesignpod

feralbydesign.com

Created and hosted by Pia Williams
Clever by Nature. Feral by Design.

What does Ozempic have to do with a venomous desert lizard that spends most of its life underground?

This story starts at 3am with a unicorn saying the word chocolate fifteen times, and ends with the Gila monster, GLP-1, Ozempic, Wegovy and one tiny molecular difference that helped change modern medicine.

Our bodies already make GLP-1. It works beautifully, then disappears in minutes. The Gila monster carries a remarkably similar molecule called exendin-4, except nature built this one differently enough that the body’s molecular scissors struggle to cut it.

That difference helped lead to Byetta, the first GLP-1 receptor agonist, and later helped inspire a deeper biomimicry move: don’t copy the molecule. Copy the principle.

And the best part? Nobody found it by asking nature how to control appetite. An endocrinologist in the Bronx found it while looking through venom.

So this episode is about food noise, microscopic scissors, accidental discovery, a drug market worth tens of billions of dollars, and a squat pink-and-black lizard that had been sitting on the answer for millions of years.

Biology: Exendin-4, found in Gila monster saliva, can activate the same GLP-1 receptor as our own hormone but resists the rapid DPP-4 breakdown that makes native GLP-1 so short-lived.

Biomimicry: Byetta copied the Gila monster molecule directly. Later GLP-1 drugs including Ozempic and Wegovy took the underlying design principle and applied it back to human GLP-1.

Next week I’m bringing back the perfect companion from Season 1. Today, the drug. Next week, the needle.

Nature owns the patent. We copied it.

Topics: Ozempic, Wegovy, GLP-1, Gila monster, exendin-4, Byetta, biomimicry.

Sources

Exendin-4 and the Gila monster

Eng J, Kleinman WA, Singh L, Singh G, Raufman JP. Isolation and characterization of exendin-4, an exendin-3 analogue, from Heloderma suspectum venom. Journal of Biological Chemistry. 1992;267(11):7402–7405.

GLP-1 physiology and DPP-4 - the biomimicry claim

Deacon CF, Knudsen LB, Madsen K, Wiberg FC, Jacobsen O, Holst JJ. Dipeptidyl peptidase IV resistant analogues of glucagon-like peptide-1 which have extended metabolic stability and improved biological activity. Diabetologia. 1998;41(3):271–278. doi:10.1007/s001250050903.

Semaglutide design

Lau J, Bloch P, Schäffer L, Pettersson I, Spetzler JC, Kofoed J, Madsen K, Knudsen LB, McGuire J, Steensgaard DB, Strauss HM, Gram DX, Knudsen SM, Nielsen FS, Thygesen P, Reedtz-Runge S, Kruse T. Discovery of the once-weekly glucagon-like peptide-1 (GLP-1) analogue semaglutide. Journal of Medicinal Chemistry. 2015;58(18):7370–7380. doi:10.1021/acs.jmedchem.5b00726.

Drucker DJ, Habener JF, Holst JJ, et al. The discovery and development of GLP-1 based drugs that have revolutionized the treatment of obesity. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2024;121(39):e2415550121. doi:10.1073/pnas.2415550121.

Knudsen LB, "Inventing Liraglutide, a Glucagon-Like Peptide-1 Analogue, for the Treatment of Diabetes and Obesity." ACS Pharmacol Transl Sci 2019;2(6):468–484. doi:10.1021/acsptsci.9b00048

Patient experience

de Vere Hunt I, Ramirez-Posada M, Babu CS, Brown-Johnson C, Linos E, Rodriguez F. Patient Experiences With GLP-1 Receptor Agonists. JAMA Network Open. 2026;9(6):e2616951. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2026.16951.

Global music industry stats - $31.7billion in 2025

https://www.ifpi.org/global-music-report-2026-global-recorded-music-revenues-grow-6-4-as-record-companies-drive-innovation/

Moonbow Unicorn Forest Bedtime story

https://insighttimer.com/corycochiolo/guided-meditations/moonbow-unicorn-forest-childrens-bedtime-story-slash-meditation

S3E05

Send Pia a note

Follow Feral for new episodes every fortnight.

Instagram / Facebook / YouTube : @feralbydesignpod

feralbydesign.com

Created and hosted by Pia Williams
Clever by Nature. Feral by Design.

In 1971, a temp agency ran a print ad for the perfect worker. She never took a vacation. Never asked for a raise. Never got sick. Never stopped. They called her the Never-Never Girl.

Nobody prints that ad anymore. We just say it about each other. Reliable. Committed. Always steps up. But knowing when to stop can be just as important.

This episode starts with a nearly finished episode of this show going in the bin, and then four nights of going back at it, a genuinely new idea every time, and nothing that survived. Every attempt felt like resourcefulness. None of it was.

The question underneath it is knowing when to stop, when the only person available to make that call is the one who's been at it for four nights?

The red harvester ant is the mascot for never stopping - the fable, the kitchen bench, busy as an ant, and she spends most of her time at home. On a hot dry day, with seeds sitting on the ground and nothing in her way, she stays in, because going out costs her more water than she'd bring back.

After forty years watching these colonies, Gordon found something stranger still: nobody makes that decision. There is no ant in charge. The colony speeds up and slows down all day on the rate of what's coming back, and not one individual ever decides anything.

Which means the ant isn't better at stopping. She's simply never asked. There's no moment in her life where she has to talk herself out of one more go.

This episode is about what that changes - why "can I do this?" is always answered yes and therefore stops nothing, why the colonies that pulled back hardest in a drought produced the most descendants, and the difference between stopping a go and stopping the goal.

Three worth stealing: find your signal, check the conditions, and know what a stop actually means.

Nothing out there has to be strong at midnight. Which is lucky.

Nature owns the patent. We get to copy it.

Biology: Red harvester ant colonies regulate foraging by the rate at which foragers return with seeds - no central control, no individual decision. On hot, dry days they forage less, because being out costs water that only returning seeds replace.

Principle: Effort is set by what comes back and what the conditions cost. Never by how hard the individual is trying.

Application: Knowing when to stop is about decision-making, not willpower. The signal that it’s time to stop is often already there and being ignored, because stopping can feel like giving up on the whole goal. Check the conditions before you start, notice when effort is no longer producing a useful return, and let one attempt end without abandoning the ambition.

Enjoyed this? Try Feral by Design Season 2: Too Fast To Think: The Sloth Strategy For Better Decisions - another episode about why doing less can be the winning move.

S3E04

Send Pia a note

Follow Feral for new episodes every fortnight.

Instagram / Facebook / YouTube : @feralbydesignpod

feralbydesign.com

Created and hosted by Pia Williams
Clever by Nature. Feral by Design.

A three-year-old turns a stolen maxi pad into a bird, a plane, and a crown - no hesitation, no second-guessing. Three completely different uses for one object in about fifteen seconds.

That moment leads to an unexpected question about risk taking profiles: why do some of us dive straight at the unfamiliar while others hang back and watch? The answer comes from decades of research on a small British songbird with a name that still makes people laugh - the great tit.

Scientists have repeatedly found two distinct exploration styles. Fast explorers move immediately and commit hard. Slow explorers sample, check, and stay adaptable long after the fast ones have already locked in. The obvious question seems to be how to create more fast explorers. Nature, however, has been answering a different question all along.

This episode explores why neither risk taking profile wins, why the very trait that helps someone commit quickly is also the one that makes them slower to let go, and what it costs a team, a family, or a friendship group when everyone responds to the unfamiliar in the same way.

Sometimes the bad question is the only way to find the good one.

References

1. Verbeek, M.E.M., Drent, P.J., & Wiepkema, P.R. (1994). Consistent individual differences in early exploratory behaviour of male great tits. Animal Behaviour, 48(5).

2. Dingemanse, N.J., Both, C., Drent, P.J., & Tinbergen, J.M. (2004). Fitness consequences of avian personalities in a fluctuating environment. Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 271(1541).

S3E03

Send Pia a note

Follow Feral for new episodes every fortnight.

Instagram / Facebook / YouTube : @feralbydesignpod

feralbydesign.com

Created and hosted by Pia Williams
Clever by Nature. Feral by Design.

London has just rehired an employee it fired four hundred years ago. No severance. No apology. Just an awkward, "Come back. We clearly can't do your job without you."

Her name's Willow, and she's a beaver.

When five Eurasian beavers were reintroduced to Paradise Fields beside Greenford Tube station in West London as part of the Ealing Beaver Project, they quietly tackled a flooding problem that engineers, councils and commuters had lived with for decades. The story of beavers, flooding and the London Underground sounds almost too neat. But the real story sits beneath the headlines.

The council's concrete-and-sandbags answer to flooding. The volunteer-built dam Willow promptly judged not good enough. Why beavers aren't really dam builders at all, but water managers. How leaky dams slow and spread water as part of natural flood management. And why the human copies still can't quite keep up.

Using a Feral lens, Pia digs into the fascinating difference between biomimicry and nature-based solutions, and makes the case for checking the dusty shelf before reaching for something shiny and new.

Last time, we borrowed boundaries advice from a beaver.

This time, nature's here to remind us that sometimes the smartest hire is the one you fired centuries ago.

Enjoyed this? Check out another Beaver episode Feral by Design Season 1 Episode 2: How to Build Boundaries That Actually Work: The Beaver Method.

Biology: Eurasian beavers continually build and maintain wetlands that slow, spread and store water, naturally reducing flood risk while creating habitat for hundreds of other species.

Principle: Living systems create conditions, not just outcomes. The behaviours that maintain a solution can be just as important as the structures themselves.

Application: The Ealing Beaver Project shows how restoring a keystone species can reduce flooding, improve biodiversity and strengthen communities. Sometimes the smartest engineering solution isn't building something new. It's recognising that nature never really forgot how to do the job.

References

• Wilson, C., Maddock, I. et al. (2023). Beaver-like dams can enhance existing flood management strategies for at-risk communities. Journal of Hydrology. Cardiff University / University of Worcester. https://www.cardiff.ac.uk/news/view/2735456-beaver-like-dams-can-enhance-existing-flood-management-strategies-for-at-risk-communities,-study-finds
• Turnbull, J., Fry, T., & Lorimer, J. (2026). Beavers in Paradise: Prefiguring London's Urban Wilds. Environment and Planning E: Nature and Space. DOI: 10.1177/25148486261447678
• Restoration Ecology. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/rec.70377
• The Ealing Beaver Project. Official project website, "Mitigate Flooding". https://theealingbeaverproject.com
• BBC News. Willow's story, Greenford flooding and the beavers' three-year flood-free record. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckg728erp1yo
• Positive News. "Step aside, humans": Interview with Şeniz Mustafa, England's first urban beaver officer. https://www.positive.news/environment/how-beavers-solved-a-flooding-problem-in-west-london/
• The Independent. Greenford flooding and the Ealing Beaver Project. https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/tube-flooding-ealing-beaver-project-greenford-b2996312.html

S3E02

Send Pia a note

Follow Feral for new episodes every fortnight.

Instagram / Facebook / YouTube : @feralbydesignpod

feralbydesign.com

Created and hosted by Pia Williams
Clever by Nature. Feral by Design.

A 14-year-old boy suffers two brain bleeds in a freak accident at school. He comes home and sleeps 21 hours a day.

To everyone watching, it looks like the world has gone quiet. In nature, that stillness isn't defeat. It's a high-stakes repair cycle we're only just beginning to understand.

This episode sits inside the gap between the crisis everyone rallies around and the long, invisible recovery nobody quite knows how to show up for, when contribution disappears, healing looks like nothing, and sometimes the injury itself can't be seen.

It started with a teenage injury, but what nature reveals applies much more widely: to recovery after injury, illness or any experience that suddenly changes what someone can do, and to the people trying to support them.

The answer turned up in the most unlikely places: a tiny ant on a raid and a social mongoose with a very specific job description.

Using a biomimicry lens, Pia explores what banded mongooses do when a member can't keep up, and what Matabele ants reveal about the signals that trigger, or fail to trigger, rescue. Not metaphor. Biological strategy.

And they point towards something surprisingly hopeful: practical ways to rethink contribution, recognise invisible need and support recovery without reducing someone to what they've lost.

Because maybe the question isn't what someone can no longer do. Maybe it's what they can still genuinely contribute, and whether the system is built to notice.

If you enjoyed this episode please share it with someone. Nature thrives on signals, and Feral does too.

00:00 Diminished
00:54 Henry's accident
05:05 A biomimicry question
08:50 Contribution, not consolation
13:05 When doing nothing is actually the work
15:25 Why invisible injuries are so isolating
17:55 The recovery is collective
22:10 Karen's question, answered
23:25 Nature owns the patent

S2E0X

Send Pia a note

Follow Feral for new episodes every fortnight.

Instagram / Facebook / YouTube : @feralbydesignpod

feralbydesign.com

Created and hosted by Pia Williams
Clever by Nature. Feral by Design.

Red wine meets MacBook. Laundry floods. Toilet leaks. All within 24 hours.

Somewhere between staring at flood-damaged laundry cabinets and Googling "how much liquid can a MacBook survive?", Pia realised she'd recently spent a lot of time thinking about forest canopies, distributed load, systems thinking, and what happens when systems become overly dependent on a single point.

Professionally, she spends a lot of time thinking about how systems absorb pressure. Personally, she'd accidentally designed herself as a single point of failure.

Using a biomimicry lens, this episode explores what forest canopies actually do: quietly solving concentrated load problems for hundreds of millions of years. Not as a metaphor. As a biological strategy.

Because canopies don't just capture sunlight. They absorb pressure, distribute load, and create overflow pathways long before they're needed.

Maybe resilience isn't about becoming stronger. Maybe it's about making sure everything isn't depending on the same branch.

Nature owns the patent. We get to copy it.

🌲 The Breakdown:

• The Biology: Forest canopies distribute environmental pressure across overlapping structures, reducing localised stress while creating pathways that absorb and redirect excess load.
• The Principle: Resilient systems spread pressure across multiple pathways rather than relying on a single component to absorb it all.

The Application: How to design personal and organisational systems with buffer and overflow capacity so disruption can be shared, redirected, or absorbed.

S2E10

Send Pia a note

Follow Feral for new episodes every fortnight.

Instagram / Facebook / YouTube : @feralbydesignpod

feralbydesign.com

Created and hosted by Pia Williams
Clever by Nature. Feral by Design.

A homemade billy cart hurtles downhill through a suburban intersection. A keynote slide turns into an entirely new workshop framework. A conference room applauds the removal of friction from modern work. Somewhere in Costa Rica, a sloth hangs completely still above a parked car while a group of humans walk straight past it.

None of these things seem connected.
Until they do.

Because mental fatigue isn't always about doing too much. Sometimes it's what happens when everything keeps inviting your attention, energy and response, while we've quietly removed many of the natural stopping cues that used to regulate us. Waiting. Friction. Pause points. The moments where thinking had time to catch up with momentum.

And perhaps some of what we experience as mental fatigue is the cost of that constant activation.

Using a biomimicry lens, Pia explores what sloths are actually optimised for - conserving energy, reducing unnecessary movement, and being highly selective about when effort is worth the cost.

Not as metaphor.
As biological strategy.

Because maybe intelligence isn’t just about how quickly you move anymore.

Maybe it’s about knowing when to pause.

Nature owns the patent. We get to copy it.

Biology: Sloths conserve energy through exceptionally slow metabolisms, camouflage, and specialised low-movement survival strategies.

Principle: Build systems that reduce unnecessary activation and make stability the default rather than relying on constant active effort.

Application: Reframing how humans design attention, work, and decision-making systems, to mitigate mental fatigue in environments increasingly optimised for constant responsiveness and escalation.

S2E09

Send Pia a note

Follow Feral for new episodes every fortnight.

Instagram / Facebook / YouTube : @feralbydesignpod

feralbydesign.com

Created and hosted by Pia Williams
Clever by Nature. Feral by Design.