About
I’m Pia Williams. I’m an innovation strategist trained in biomimicry, and I am increasingly obsessed by what happens when you stop treating nature as scenery and start paying attention to how it solves things.
I created Feral by Design to take biomimicry out of specialist circles and into the messy places humans actually live, work and make decisions - across product, process, experience, behaviour and systems. To reconnect people with the power and genius of nature: as a mentor, a rigorous design tool, an inspiring know-it-all, and a way of seeing problems differently.
Built solo
Feral by Design is built end-to-end by me. I research the biology, investigate the human challenge, work through the ideas, then write, narrate, record, edit, score, produce and distribute every episode. From the logo to the latest thumbnail, every part of it is made by me.
Nature owns the patent. We get to copy it.
"I'm loving your ability to storytell concepts that often get wrapped up in jargon that gets in the way. You're like Mark Ritson, but with a natural world angle. Absolutely love it!"
Sam, NSW Australia
Naming the baby
The name is really an expression of how I see biomimicry and nature-inspired design: looking to the wild for strategies and design principles that can help solve human problems.
I chose the word Feral deliberately. I love its true meaning: escaping domestication, living in an untamed state and adapting to the conditions. That's what I want the show to encourage in our thinking too: escape the usual rules and assumptions, and look to nature for different approaches to creative problem solving.
By Design because, of course, we're doing it on purpose.
Feral is one expression of the work I’ve been doing for close to two decades through 6th Sense Innovation: helping organisations tackle difficult problems through innovation and human-centred design, with biomimicry becoming part of that toolkit.
These days I’m particularly interested in what happens when we bring three kinds of intelligence together: human intelligence, nature’s intelligence and artificial intelligence.
I also speak and run workshops on biomimicry, innovation and what nature can teach us about designing more responsive organisations, products and systems.
If you’d like to take the thinking beyond the podcast, you can find my consulting work at 6th Sense Innovation.
Beyond Feral.
