Feral by Design | The Biomimicry Podcast

2026 Signal Awards Finalist  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.