Selected endorsements for The Shark’s Paintbrush
Imagine Indiana Jones, Huckleberry Finn, and Erasmus Darwin rolled into one person, and you will have some sense of what it is like to roam and see the world through Jay Harman’s biomimetic eyes. The Shark’s Paintbrush is a memo of kindness from the living world in a time of crisis and doubt: life in all its intricacy offers untold possibilities for the transformation of civilization.
This book filled my heart with joy. Equal parts adventure story for entrepreneurs, saavy management and business oracle, and romance novel with nature, “The Shark’s Paintbrush” is a page-turner. For social entrepreneurs, biologists, designers, engineers or any innovators seeking encouragement and inspiration to follow a passionately-held, seemingly far-fetched dream, this book will help to reassure you that it’s all (anything’s) possible – if you are willing to persevere, spiral like seaweed, and curl into the wind like oak leaves.
The Shark’s Paintbrush makes for fascinating and joyful reading—much needed in these dark times.
The Shark’s Paintbrush reveals how nature is inspiring design to be more efficient, effective, resilient, and beautiful. In Nature’s 3.8 billion years of design experience, the roughly 99% of designs that didn’t work got recalled by the Manufacturer. The 1% that survived can teach profound lessons about how things should be made, how they work, and how they fit. Jay Harman’s immersion in and curiosity about the natural world have made him one of the best biomimetic designers. The Shark’s Paintbrush is a masterly field guide for all designers and entrepreneurs who aspire to help the world of the made work like, and live harmoniously with, the world of the born.
Jay Harman is the quintessential biomimic, a principled inventor who sees solutions everywhere he looks in the natural world. And he looks deeply, with the soul of a student. He moves with grace from a world of waving sea kelp to the world of sustainable design, bringing nature’s wisdom into the board rooms of global companies, to the design tables of the engineers and designers who make our world. This is more than a business book, more than a memoir, more than a new way to solve global challenges. It’s a book about a new way to think.