Mia Sea: A biomimetic designer that bridges disciplines

Mia Sea is a designer, nature lover, citizen of the world, and the force behind Aegis. She is also a collaborator of Greek Women in STEM, artist, and catalyst of changes in the socio-political level. She works at the intersection between philanthropy, design, and futuristic spheres. In the past few years, she has developed a non-profit incubator, which allows her to basically have a legal framework to prototype projects for the future of our world.

Last year, they launched a little digital agency called Pixi, that allows them to tackle more digital projects linked to the development of tools and digital creative production. Today she works with this cross-disciplinary blend of projects and visions that will hopefully collide in the long-term and allow her and her colleagues to create beautiful pieces of the future.

Tell us what you do.

I am a designer, working mainly on ways we are creating the future. My work ranges from humanitarian and community development projects to projects around technological innovation and ethics, to cultural spheres like world building, creative direction and narratives that can help us envision and create an inspiring future.

I design projects that can make a difference in the world, through my own organization IVunited, as a partner or consultant for other companies and organizations that align with my vision, as well as for national plans in relations with the evolution of countries. For example, I am in Greece, helping regional authorities and local unions take steps to develop the future of the South of the country.

What does a multidisciplinary designer do?

For me it is mainly about designing projects, strategies, and spaces at the intersection between sciences, arts, businesses and philanthropy. This may seem like quite a vast landscape of action, but the one constant that I do follow is that I focus on biomimicry or biomimetic design. This means that I look into nature and natural laws for models to follow instead of the fabricated laws we have inherited from our societies.

The theory behind biomimicry is that by searching for a way of thinking through basic principles we focus on what is real versus what is a construct of society. Thus, we will progressively manage to unite growth, technology, and human.

Can you describe in more detail what is biomimicry?

Imitation of natural patterns and behaviors to enable technical advances can now be applied to social and artistic fields. And there enters biomimicry. 
Biomimicry is a framework that is focused on solving complex human or human-made problems through solutions inspired by nature. This means biology, chemistry, physics, evolutionary and anthropological studies.

The world we live in is entangled through centuries of biased leadership-driven decisions. It has reached a point of absurdity especially in matters regarding our perception of reality (deeply rooted in misogyny, racism, ableism, and persecution of the “other” in general), as well as bureaucracy, public governance or education. In comparison, looking at natural laws is such a breath of fresh air, because there are physical, scientific, and purely logical reasons why things work the way they do in perfect homeostasis.

When you hold an apple and drop it, if nothing interferes with its trajectory it will fall straight ahead because the force of gravity will pull it that way. It’s the same kind of elementary reasoning that we need to find in order to design the systems we live in and the tools we use, rethinking all those spinning entangled sets of logic that govern our lives. 

Going from theory to implementation, mainstream biomimicry tends to focus on engineering and architecture. As an example, replicating the shape of a bird’s beak onto the nose of a train can increase its speed. Naturally, there are other forms that apply biomimetic principles to a range of applications. Speaking for myself, I mainly look at it from a systems design point of view, as well as from an experience design point of view, trying to translate aesthetics, sensorial experiences and systemic frameworks into natural stimuli and organic growth. It’s like setting in motion the right signals to orient the evolution of a situation in the right direction. This serves me when I work with projects through my NGO’s incubator for example, like we have with Greek Women in STEM making sure that the platform moves towards where the future of Greece is going. It applies also when I work on the design of national strategies for companies or humanitarian causes, and ultimately when I delve into more artistically oriented design projects. Α tool that I do love to use and turn to often is the Krebs Cycle of Creativity by the MIT Media Lab’s Neri Oxman, the logic behind which was inspired by the Krebs cycle for cellular energy transfer. The Krebs Cycle of Creativity is a cartographic analysis linking together the fields of arts, design, engineering and science in a way that helps us see how each field revolutionizes the others.

Taken all together, we can say that biomimicry is inspiring human innovation by projecting our perspective from a single blink of an evolutionary eye to the long and complex processes that govern evolution and change in nature. And that alone, it is liberating, beautiful, and, of course, natural.

How did you start using these types of tools and models?

Throughout my life, people around me, either mentors or teachers have always advised me to pick something I enjoy and stick to it. I radically never agreed with this. I always wanted to accumulate disciplines rather than settle for the ones that felt like the closest thing to satisfaction. For many years, I was traveling and exploring which helped me discover in depth our world and study potential scenarios for the future of humanity. Progressively, biomimicry emerged as an obvious thing. I stumbled upon the work of the MIT Media Lab, and the field of material ecology. I embraced the discipline of biomimicry as a rich and inspiring area to build upon, and due to its multiple directions.

What influenced you most to pursue this direction in life?

It started with a fascination for arts, design, chemistry and astronomy from a very young age, as my mother was an avant-garde fashion designer using all kinds of cool experimental techniques to imprint nature and patterns of the world onto silk gowns. 

In parallel I wanted to study physics. As a kid I fell in love with Leonardo Da Vinci and the idea that the greatest artists are also amazing inventors and scientists. Multidisciplinary approaches just always made more sense to me. I was also fascinated by Einstein's last quest in the search for a Theory of Everything and the Unified Field Theory. Math and physics were always like this beautiful language and divine logic in my eyes and learning the "secret code" of the universe sounded like an adventure I really wanted to embark on. I was kind of obsessed with this idea that if we can piece together a Theory of Everything, it will just allow us to extrapolate our knowledge about the universe into everything that we live for, to reach a state of beautiful utopia on earth and in the universe. I went on to study communication, which seemed interesting to me at the intersection between creative expression, behavioral sciences and technology. Ultimately it all merged with my love for tech and design. 

What advice would you give to the women reading this today?

We need more collaboration between sciences and arts. Sciences and cultures. STEM and community development. Bringing more women into STEM is important, but it is also very important to combat the deeply rooted misogyny and racial biases that became embedded in everything we do, use, and see on a daily basis.

I think finding ways to create bridges between fields, countries and genders in a united way is one of the most important things we can do right now. The future is unified. In my opinion our generation needs to take time to build links in our communities, in our companies and in our research, and learn to work together with people from very different fields and backgrounds from our own. That's how paradigm-shifting change occurs, holistically. 

Overall, the future is complicated and multidirectional. There is no way of knowing what will happen years from now. My advice for those who are not sure about what to do with their lives and careers is to not settle if it doesn't seem right yet. This might make life riskier, but it is worth it. I encourage you to reach out to me. Maybe we can create interesting things together!