Feral by Design

About Feral by Design

2026 Signal Awards Finalist | Solopreneur Category. 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.

Publisher

Pia Williams

Category

arts · business · science

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

9 Oct 2025

Latest episode

30 Sept 2026

Latest episodes

29 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   30 Sept 2026

   Looking for Lions, Finding Termites: Attention by Design

   What happens when you give someone a way of looking, without telling them what to find? Pia takes one small part of her octopus-inspired innovation method out of the office and sends it on holiday to Zimbabwe with her friend Jane. The experiment starts at Eastgate Centre in Harare, the termite-inspired building from the previous episode. Jane gets one loose lens: How does this place feel? What can you hear? What do you notice? What surprises you? Then Pia gets out of the way. What begins as a...

2. 

   10 Sept 2026

   The Building That Breathes: What Eastgate Centre Learned From Termites

   Eastgate Centre in Harare is one of biomimicry’s most famous buildings. Inspired by termite mounds, its passive cooling system has been studied and repeated as a case study for 30 years. But what happens when you actually go inside? For this episode, Feral did. Our first roving correspondent, Jane, went on the ground in Zimbabwe to find out what Eastgate feels like today, how its termite-inspired design actually works, and whether the famous biomimicry story still holds up. She found cold...

3. 

   1 Sept 2026

   How Mosquitoes Inspired Painless Needles (REVISITED)

   Last week, we looked at the biology behind GLP-1 medicines like Ozempic and Wegovy. This revisited Season 1 episode looks at the other half of that moment: the needle itself. Mosquito mouthparts have inspired researchers and designers working on less painful needle technology, microneedles and medical devices. Their six-part feeding system works very differently from a conventional needle, using multiple tiny structures together rather than one blunt puncture. When you were a kid, did you eve...

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