Biomimicry should be more than an aesthetic. 

“A truer biomimicry, Soar believes, would abandon simple biophilia and its crude design metaphors—bullet trains as bird beaks, sharkskins as swimsuits, or termite mounds as skyscrapers.

Instead, architects and designers would begin building things as nature builds them. That is, iteratively and algorithmically, with each form sculpted by many optimized functions, each of which acts as its own independent agent.

Soar and many others have experimented with simulating insects and insect homes using ‘agent modeling systems’ in which thousands, millions, even billions of individual programs— each a very primitive ‘virtual insect’ with its own objective—compete over limited resources within some carefully arranged digital domain. Following the ‘right’ set of rules in their virtual world, the agents can replicate the structures and morphologies actual insects create in reality.

These systems are not limited to replication, however—they can also be used for innovation. Sometimes, complex optimizations can emerge that bear little resemblance to anything produced by the minds of insects or of humans.”

http://nautil.us/issue/8/home/the-termite-and-the-architect

//Iterate. Learn. Optimize. Repeat.