Towards a new material culture. bio-inspired design, parametric modeling, material design, digital manufacture.

Digital technologies represent, for the world of design and for material culture, un-precedented expressive and innovation opportunities. In particular, the development of digital manufacturing has generated new formal, structural and constructive freedoms in comparison with the constraints of traditional production techniques. This phenome-non has seen in parallel the development of parametric and generative modeling soft-ware, able to support designers in the development of products characterized by com-plex, yet extremely efficient and sustainable shapes and structures, such as those inspi-red by nature. At the same time, a new bio-inspired design approach is emerging as an opportunity to draw from nature new lessons, observed at the nanoscale and so far unknown, useful for developing innovative solutions to human problems and increasing the environmental sustainability of products, materials and systems. Therefore, the in-tegration of a bio-inspired approach to design, with the development of “designed” materials and with digital technologies for parametric modeling and additive manufac-turing, represents a promising challenge for design and the culture of doing, especially in a perspective of environmental sustainability. The paper intends to outline the poten-tial and benefits of this integrated design approach as a "virtuous circle" for the design and production of innovative and sustainable artifacts, through the description of an experimental design case study.