Step 7 Evaluate & Continuous improvement

“It is not the strongest or most intelligent of the species that survives.
It is the one that is the most adaptable to change.“

-Charles Darwin

A few great tools to help evaluate your solution are life’s principles or Nature’s unifying patterns. These are the main evaluating tools used in biomimicry and can aid in checking how life-friendly your solution is. Especially use these tools to assess your strategy and vision around how the solution will be implemented and interacts with other parts of the system when operational. The tools can be used as a checklist or as a set of goals to strife towards, aiming to achieve as many as possible.
Also incorporate cost-benefit analysis, your story of place and local context to evaluate your solution.

Life’s principles from the Biomimicry Institute.

Create evaluation indicators that will allow you to measure performance over time. For example. Then use these to gather feedback. The feedback along with the tools should be used to iterate and improve the solution over time.

The process is not a linear one but a circular one.

First, evaluate your solution as objectively as possible with the chosen method. Then think of ways to already improve your solution to maybe add or enhance a life’s principle etc.

It is important to not see this now as the end of the project. Rather a good starting point, which will need continuous evaluation and adjustments to keep improving and adapting to changes. Just like how in nature everything is always changing and species need to adapt and evolve accordingly.

Next: Step 8.

Previous: Step 6.