Current & Past Projects
A closer look at the key projects that define teaching focussed research, bridging the gap between art, science, and sustainable systems engineering.
Zygote Quarterly Journal
Status:
2011 - present
Summary:
I co-founded Zygote Quarterly (https://zqjournal.org), an open-source bio-inspired design journal, with Tom McKeag and Norbert Hoeller in 2011. My initial interest was to have an accessible resource for students and ZQ aims to provide additional details and facts for practical use in real engineering and design contexts: How was it done? How can we use it? Why is it important? How can we improve current design and application? How can we abstract forms, processes, and systems from biology into viable innovative methodologies and technologies?
ZQ provides the whole story from inspiration to concept generation, to development, to testing, to redesigning, to marketing, to commercialization—and in many cases to ‘failure:’ why does a seemingly great idea not become commercially viable?
The journal has become much more over the past 15 years, a labour of love, and is being read by students, researchers, and professionals – and accessed in all but 16 countries globally.
editors:
Shoshanah Jacobs, Norbert Hoeller, Marjan Eggermont [Tom McKeag: 2011-2026]
Our mission: to establish a credible platform showcasing the nexus of science, technology and creativity in the field of bio-inspired design, using case studies, news and articles that are exemplary in their impact on the field, rigorous in their methodology, and relevant to today’s reader.
Nature Design Cards
Status:
2022 - present
Investigation Area:
Funding:
Climate Action Grant,
Government of Canada, SSE Momentum
A collaboration by the University of Calgary and Sustainable Calgary:
Chickadee Collective: Semi Adeyinka, Chetan Gupta, Nicolas Leo Moreira, Liam Pond, Parita Patel, Lynny Sharp, Natalie Zardecki, Dr. Marjan Eggermont, Dr. Mindi Summers, Dr. Kerry Black, Tara Meyer, Celia Lee.
A collaborative, community-based education and design challenge supported by a nature-inspired design toolkit. The material celebrates and raises awareness of our local biodiversity, and trains K-12 students, university students, and members of the community to look to nature as inspiration for sustainable design and climate action. This toolkit features a series of Nature Design Cards that introduce Alberta’s species and includes an Indigenous perspectives and storytelling component that is currently under development. The cards describe what we can learn from these species and how we can apply this to strategies needed to design more sustainable cities, materials, and processes. The final toolkit will eventually include guides and collaborative activities to empower kids/citizens to apply this approach in their own neighbourhoods, inspired by Sustainable Calgary’s co-design toolkits.
Parasite Card Deck
Status:
2026 - present
Investigation Area:
Community outreach material for an innovative, interactive training program with novel, fundamental and translational research output with societal benefit.
Funding:
SSE Momentum
Collaborators:
HOST-PARASITE INTERACTIONS Research Training Network, Sustainable Calgary, Nicolas Leo Moreira.
A continuation of the nature cards project. The HPI program is the largest parasitology research group in Canada, with over 75 trainees in any given year and lead by 19 researchers from the Cumming School of Medicine, Public Health, Faculties of Science, Veterinary Medicine and Arts at the Universities in Calgary, Lethbridge, Alberta, Manitoba and Victoria.
Biomimicry at the Zoo
Status:
Completed 2023
Investigation Area:
A collection of audio files to help people learn about the many incredible animals they are likely to find at a local zoo, and how these animals might inspire new products, processes and systems.
Funding:
Summer student funding
Collaborators:
Jessica Ritchie, Jake Ruschkowski (Mountain Goat)
Janine Benyus coined the term “biomimicry” in 1997 when she published her book Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature. Many terms have been used since the 1900s – biotechnik, bionics, biomimetics, bio-inspired design – but the term biomimicry is understood to indicate ‘sustainable and regenerative’ design inspired by nature. Benyus created the term by combining bios, which refers to life or living things, and mimicry, which means to copy or emulate. So, in its most simple terms biomimicry means copying life. Benyus, a biologist as well as an author, defines biomimicry as “the conscience emulation of nature’s genius.” As Thomas Edison once said, “Until man duplicates a blade of grass, nature can laugh at his so-called scientific knowledge.” Another but perhaps more pragmatic definition is that biomimicry is a sustainable design tool based on emulating strategies used by living things to perform functions that we want our technologies to perform – everything from creating color to generating energy to optimizing data bases. The goal of biomimicry is to design products and processes, companies and policies – new ways of living - that are well adapted to life on earth over an extended period of time.
Biomole
Status:
Completed 2019 as part of PhD
Investigation Area:
Functional Co-Occurrence:
https://hcds.itu.dk/assets/publications/eggermont2019biomole.pdf
Collaborators:
Søren Knudsen, Richard Pusch, and Sheelagh Carpendale at University of Calgary and Simon Fraser University.
Biomole, an interactive visualization designed to explore
a data set created to support bio-inspiration design published by
the Ask Nature organization. The Ask Nature data set contains
a hierarchy of functions which we encode within different visual
elements of Biomole; most importantly interactive data painting
of functions allows people to search for functional co-occurrence.
The movement of the visual elements is a metaphorical nod to the
bio-inspired nature of the data and the uncertainty of the design
solution space.
Fireflies
Status:
Completed 2016 by Bon Adriel Aseniero as part of a course I taught during my PhD
Investigation Area:
An exploration of bio-inspired visualization using animal swarming behaviours and plant phyllotaxis.
Collaborators:
Bon Adriel Aseniero, Charles Perin, Marjan Eggermont, Sheelagh Carpendale.
Bon Adriel Aseniero, Charles Perin, Marjan Eggermont, Sheelagh Carpendale. Fireflies: Expressive Infovis Inspired by Biomimicry. In Demo, IEEE VIS 2016 Arts Program (VISAP'16 Metamorphoses). IEEE, 2016.
Bon Adriel Aseniero, Charles Perin, Marjan Eggermont, Sheelagh Carpendale. Fireflies: Biomimicry-Inspired Infovis for Exploring Public Opinion about an Infectious Disease. In Poster Session, IEEE Information Visualization (InfoVis 2016). IEEE, 2016.
publications:
Group exhibition:
Fireflies was part of a student work group exhibition called Murmuration.
"Fireflies, chameleons and starlings were the inspiration for Murmuration, which explores natural networks and data visualization in sculptural and digital media. Part of Beakerhead, Calgary’s celebration of all things art and science, the show features work by Bon Adriel Aseniero, Sheelagh Carpendale, Roxane Fallah and Mahdiar Ghaffarianhoseini. Curator Marjan Eggermont is an artist who teaches engineering design and communication at the University of Calgary."
Fireflies is an exploration on how inspiration from nature can be leveraged in order to encode data into visual representations that enable curious exploration. In Fireflies, each data-point becomes a character—a firefly—expressing its aspects through visual variables such as motion and colour. Like swarming animals, fireflies can move across the visualization space, creating groups with other similar fireflies. In groups, fireflies position themselves into beautiful phyllotactic patterns resembling how seeds grow within sunflower heads. We applied Fireflies to visualize data from a survey regarding Canadian's attitudes towards HIV/AIDS. Fireflies representing people express their discomfort towards HIV/AIDS through jittering motions. More jittering means greater discomfort. We also designed Fireflies to enable exploration for curiosity, thus, people are free to make their own groupings of fireflies based on a given parameter. This alludes to Metamorphoses where transformations are capricious, left in the whims of the gods. Consequently, the visualization becomes an ever changing spectacle of colours and motion.
