Feral by Design | The Biomimicry Podcast

By Pia Williams

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Image by Pia Williams

Category: Nature

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Episodes: 31

Description

🏆 Double 2026 Signal Award Winner (Listener's Choice & Judges' Silver Award)


Feral by Design is a practical biomimicry podcast hosted by Australian innovation strategist Pia Williams that steals nature’s smartest strategies for human chaos.


What if a better way through a problem, from product and process innovation to workplace burnout, communication bottlenecks and creative blocks, could be found by bringing human insight and biology together?


Across 3.8 billion years, nature has evolved extraordinary ways to communicate, adapt, build, collaborate, protect, regulate and survive. Engaging in what Pia playfully calls Grand Theft Bio, Feral looks directly to nature for wild, elegant strategies we might steal for our own messy problems.


Each episode starts with a real-world challenge, then uses human-centred design and biomimicry to dig into how nature handles the relevant function and translate the biology into something useful. That might mean an original product or process innovation, a way to make better decisions or tackle human behaviour, or investigating what really happened when designers turned to nature for answers.


Made for curious minds, Feral translates complex biology into short, self-deprecating and highly insightful stories spanning design and innovation, lateral thinking, creative problem solving, self improvement and personal development. Whether it's applying an octopus's distributed intelligence, turning a biological strategy into a new product concept, or borrowing a beaver's approach to boundaries, Feral finds surprisingly useful ways to design, work, think and live a little differently.


Expect field experiments, self-inflicted disasters, surprising science and plenty of ideas you may want to steal.


Hit follow, and let's go steal some genius.


Nature owns the patent. We get to copy it.


Episode Date
A Dancing Spider, a Slime Mould and an Unlikely Awards Win
Nov 08, 2026
The Goat Brigade: Reducing Bushfire Risk, One Chew at a Time
Oct 20, 2026
Looking for Lions, Finding Termites: Attention by Design
Sep 30, 2026
How Termites Taught a Building to Keep Cool (Eastgate Centre)
Sep 10, 2026
How Mosquitoes Inspired Painless Needles (REVISITED)
Sep 01, 2026
Ozempic's Secret Weapon: What The Gila Monster Taught Us
Aug 24, 2026
Knowing When to Stop: 3 Things Worth Stealing From an Ant
Aug 10, 2026
What’s Your Risk Taking Profile? Lessons From the Great Tit
Jul 20, 2026
Leave It To Beavers: The London Underground Flooding Fix
Jul 07, 2026
After Injury: Making the Invisible Visible
Jun 19, 2026
The Tree Canopy Effect: Systems Thinking From a Wine-Soaked Laptop
Jun 01, 2026
Too Fast To Think: What Sloths Teach Us About Mental Fatigue
May 19, 2026
Too Fast to Be Legal: The Shark Skin Scandal
May 04, 2026
The Firefly Concept: Dementia Behaviour Pain or Panic?
Apr 20, 2026
Moral Vertigo: When Distant Wars Don't Stay Distant
Apr 06, 2026
When Defensiveness Enters the Room: The Electric Fish Method
Mar 23, 2026
What Is Biomimicry? (In 4 Minutes)
Mar 09, 2026
Bird-Safe Glass: What Spiderwebs Taught Us About Windows.
Feb 23, 2026
Wombats, Mange & How to Break the Cycle of Recurring Problems
Feb 09, 2026
How Cuttlefish Could Redesign Beach Safety
Jan 26, 2026
Snowflake Logic: The Case for an Imperfect Christmas
Dec 15, 2025
The Prawn: Why the Holidays Make You Feel Raw
Dec 08, 2025
How to Make Learning New Skills Stick: The Meerkat Method
Dec 01, 2025
The Mussel Concept: Redesigning the Disposable Coffee Cup
Nov 24, 2025
Swooped: What Magpies Know About Handling Conflict
Nov 17, 2025
Hooked: How Burrs Inspired Velcro
Nov 11, 2025
The Octopus Method: Octopus Intelligence When You’re the Bottleneck
Nov 04, 2025
How to Build Boundaries That Actually Work: The Beaver Method
Oct 28, 2025
How Mosquitoes Inspired Painless Needles
Oct 28, 2025
Introducing Feral by Design: Solving Human Problems with Nature
Oct 17, 2025
Feral by Design | The Biomimicry Podcast - TRAILER
Oct 09, 2025