Innovate With Nature - Trinidad expedition

Imagine spending 5 days in full immersion in one of the most beautiful islands of the West Indies: Trinidad. You will immerse yourself in nature and get deeper into the beautiful innovations of this ecosystem. You may find inspiration for your next design but also change the way you live as a whole. Are you ready to fully immerse yourself in nature? We promise this experience will transform you, for the better!

Imagine learning from nature to come up with new, sustainable and highly efficient solutions in areas like transport, energy, sheltering or packaging, and even communication and management.

You will learn incredible strategies and solutions around how nature masters movement, on the ground, on water or in the air. You will also discover beautiful solutions for energy harvesting, storage and distribution from plants and birds. You will also be amazed by smart natural packaging and sheltering solutions from insects and animals. And finally wonder at collaborative communication strategies that insects or birds implemented to hunt, organize and survive in this region.

All of these great insights could be useful to build the masterplan for your next innovation whether you work as an engineer, designer or in strategy in your company.

You will be exploring the surroundings of Grande Riviere, one of the most beautiful places in Trinidad, and learning from nature by observing it with local biologists and naturalists. You will also be guided throughout this journey by our fantastic team of facilitators who will equip you with tools and knowledge to better tackle the challenges your business faces.

You will be learning by doing, putting new techniques into practice to design new solutions with the help of special tools such as the Circulab. Notions from design thinking, biomimicry and the circular economy will be taught and put daily into practice to improve your learnings outcomes.

For companies this training represents a fantastic opportunity to stimulate the creativity of their employees, have them think in a more holistic way and improve their problem solving skills with new techniques.

PROGRAM

We will establish our camp base near Grande Riviere in the northeastern part of Trinidad.

Mornings will be moments dedicated for outdoor activities and exploration of nature with biologists where you will learn incredible engineering from birds, insects, plants, fish and mammals.

Afternoons will be dedicated to analyzing, relating and benchmarking for solutions to human problems related to human challenges. This could also be complemented with deeper exploration of nature outside if needed. Inspiration from the natural way of reacting to stress, constraints and unpredictability will help participants to reflect on how to implement new management and functional modes.

Evenings will be dedicated to contextualizing with a series of games and prototyping tools in order to bring your ideas to life as much as possible.

This program is dedicated to give you easy access to nature as a tremendous source of inspiration in your work (and also for your life in general). Expect to be surprised and amazed by nature's incredible sustainable and efficient strategies. You will also learn process and methodology to innovate with nature when you come back home.

MONDAY

We will all arrive on Monday morning from the city of Port of Spain to the small eco lodge in Grande Riviere.

Arriving in the lodge we will unpack and give you some introduction for the workshop to come and explain basics concepts of biomimicry that we will use during these 3 days together.

The late afternoon and evening will be dedicated for some time outside, followed by a walk to see sunset and organize a dinner outside (if weather conditions allow to).

TUESDAY

We will start this day by giving you instruction about your first challenge and group you in a first team as well. Each day is dedicated to a new challenge. Also you will change teams each day so you can connect and work with everybody during these days together.

Will we start our morning walk outside with an energizing game to open your 5 senses. We will then stay outside for about 2 hours with a biologist. We want you to explore the local context and the living species out there that developed interesting strategies related to your challenges.

Back at our camp base, we will have lunch altogether and start gathering, commenting and analyzing our first insights in teams.

The evening will be the time for contextualizing and reflecting on your first discoveries and solutions.

WEDNESDAY

During this day, there will be on option to have a tour on your own in the morning or a snorkeling excursion by boat. We will continue working on our challenges just before having lunch together. In the afternoon we have imagine a series of exercises on the beach followed by turtle viewing later in the evening.

TEAM:

Nicolas Buttin is the co-founder of Wiithaa, a design and innovation agency focusing on circular economy. Clients include L’Oréal, IKEA, Danone, Nespresso, AXA, Bouygues, Orange and Suez. He is also the co-founder of the Circulab methodology which purpose is to activate the circular economy for companies. Circulab is now a global network of trained certified consultants (more than 50 people on all continents). Nicolas is the co-author of the book 'Activate the circular economy' (in French, soon available in English) released in 2015. He is also a speaker at various global conferences including TEDx where he talked about how to reconnect with nature. Nicolas has been teaching design and economy for many years in business and design schools as well as engineering and political sciences institutions like SciencesPo. Nicolas is graduated from Celsa in Paris and also owns a post-graduate in Design Management from the University of the Arts London. He is a specialist on design thinking innovation methodology theorized in Stanford where he has been coaching yearly projects from ME310 international program (d.school). Nicolas helps companies turn big ideas into tangible products and services by running collaborative workshops based on business games and rapid prototyping. He also accompanies businesses on the design and implementation of such innovations. Nicolas has always been a nature lover, sustainability advocate and open-source believer. He started to specialize in biomimicry by co-designing a game on the best cases of biomimicry: Biomimicards (freely available online), before developing the Circulab, which is also inspired by nature’s resilience and cost effectiveness. Nicolas is living and working in Paris.

Giselle Carr is a design strategist with fifteen years experience spanning branding, graphic and web design, art direction, research, social innovation, environmental analysis, leadership and business development. An alumni of the Design Management graduate program at Pratt Institute in New York, she works to integrate economic profit with societal and environmental value. Evolving from design thinking, to business leadership and then to sustainable design has made her more specialised, but more expansive in her ability to create impact. She excels at seeing opportunities across borders and industries in a changing world. Growing up as the daughter of an agronomist, she developed a profound love of nature spending her childhood years living in rural central Trinidad. It was through Pratt that she was first introduced to biomimicry, which she then pursued by attending an immersion in Costa Rica hosted by the Biomimicry Institute. Since then she has spoken at events and conducted workshops with youth in Trinidad, creating awareness and providing tools to a new generation of innovators. She is also a partner at Abovegroup, a design strategy firm based in Trinidad and UK, and consults independently.