About Greengaged

Greengaged is a not for profit organisation founded in 2008 by Sophie Thomas from thomas.matthews, Sarah Johnson from Re Design and Anne Chick from The Sustainable Design Research Centre at Kingston University.

Greengaged aims to advance the design industry’s capacity to respond positively to key environmental challenges such as climate change. This is done by offering thought leadership, creating spaces for dialogue, and opportunities for knowledge sharing - within the industry and beyond.

Sophie Thomas

Sophie runs the communication design agency thomas.matthews, a trail-blazer in innovative sustainable design, which she co-founded in 1998. She is an ambassador for the cause through her lecturing and in her role as trustee to the Design Council and has co-founded the designer’s resource Three Trees Don’t Make A Forest.

Sarah Johnson

Sarah runs the social enterprise [re]design an organisation that propagates sustainable actions through design. [re]design promote products and projects that are friendly to people and planet, and partner with a wide range of organisations to pioneer sustainable innovation.

Anne Chick

Anne is Director of the Sustainable Design Research Centre and heads up the new MA on Design for Development at Kingston University. She has been an academic pioneer in sustainability for over fifteen years and her sustainable design research, knowledge transfer and educational work are acknowledged worldwide.

Kate Andrews

With an array of socially focused clients under her belt, Kate is an independent communications designer and consultant. In 2008, Kate set up and led the digital communications for greengaged and has since joined the team to assist its invaluable online presence. Kate is currently studying an MA in Design Writing Criticism at London College of Communication.

About Us
Greengaged | 8 Disney Street, London | 020 7403 4281 | email

Biomimicry in Design: Learning from Nature

September 23, 2009, 9:00am to 5:00pm

The Design Council

Ants can make zero waste, solar powered, sustainable architecture; how can we apply their ‘intelligence’ and 3.5 billion years of research and development to human focused, sustainable design? Join Michael Pawlyn, a pioneer of biomimetic architecture, and other prominent thinkers in this rapidly emerging area of design for this day of astounding talks and inspiring workshops.


Morning Session

Is biomimicry at the core of your design process? It could be. This session will show you the possibilities inherent in nature’s designs, explored through brilliant case studies and projects that have applied the design thinking of amazingly innovative and sustainable closed-loop solutions. Between the talks, an engaging workshop will encourage you to explore the relationship between design requirements and nature’s solutions, where sustainability is developed as an inherently critical characteristic of good design.

Confirmed subjects/speakers include:

  • Title to be confirmed – Melissa Sterry, Founder and CEO of Societás
  • Biomimicry and Architecture – Michael Pawlyn, Director of Exploration Architecture Ltd.
  • Deeper Principles of Biomimicry – Julian Vincent, Professor of Biomimetics at the University of Bath, and Associate Chief Editor of the Journal of Bionic Engineering


Afternoon Session

Building on the knowledge established in the morning session the afternoon focuses on how design practitioners can practically applying nature’s design practice to human focused design requirements. The afternoon will mix discussion and feedback with an exploratory workshop exercise. Expect to take away new insights about systems thinking that will radically change the way you think about the potential of design to positively transform our world.

Confirmed subjects/speakers include:

  • Title to be confirmed – Andy Middleton, Management Coach / Director: Thinking at Work
  • Biomimicry Improvisation Exercise – Belina Raffy
  • Systems-thinking workshop – Michael Pawlyn, Director of Exploration Architecture Ltd.

Additional speakers to be confirmed

N.B – Content of the day is subject to change


This event has now finished.