What are some examples of engineering influenced by nature's "designs?" Have humans ever engineered anything they didn't understand by imitating nature?

The part of the question I’m having trouble with is the “have we ever engineered anything without fully understanding the underlying mechanics of what we’re imitating?” part. I can think of any number of things that humans have engineered by imitating nature, but not any where we didn’t understand the underlying mechanics of what we were imitating. That would seem to be necessary in order to imitate it. Maybe someone else can think of something, but I can’t.

To be fair, I had a hell of a time wording it and probably didn’t get my point across properly.

So say we didn’t understand why twisting about in the particular way that cats do causes them to always land on their feet. Without understanding the physics behind it, we could build a robot that imitates the cat’s movements and this might allow us to successfully engineer that robot to always land on its “feet” without having an understanding of how exactly our creation works. Maybe that doesn’t make as much sense as I think it does.

I couldn’t resist sharing this one about jellyfish robots!
http://gizmodo.com/383281/aquajelly-and-airjelly-robot-jellyfish-at-home-in-the-water-or-the-sky
What always impressed me is how the engineering concept of cantilevering was inspired by trees. Frank Lloyd Wright used it in his design concepts and if I am not mistaken suspension bridges use it too.
http://www.franklloydwright.org/fllwf_web_091104/Wrights_Life_and_Work.html

Read Janine Bensus’s (sp?) book Biomimicry. Also see The Land Institute’s prairie project. There’s also a guy in SFO that mimics how insects move to design machines. There are tons more examples of this idea that I can’t think of right now but if you dig around the internet you will find them. I think a good example of how people have created something they didn’t understand by mimicking nature is the complex agroforests you find in traditional farming villages of tropical developing countries (e.g. damar plantations of Indonesia, shade coffee in China, etc) or that South American (?) tribe that figured out that spreading charcoal around the soil made an otherwise inhospitable environment fertile. Did they understand all the complexities of the systems they were manipulating to grow food? I doubt it since we still have a limited understanding today, but through trial and error and observation they were able to figure out what works and what doesn’t.

Guess there’s a field out there called biomimicry these days where as just one of several studies being made, scientist are trying to imitate how a lizard’s feet could give it the ability to attach on walls and ceilings and walk on them. Hello, zero scaffolding high rise window washing.

At first I didnt understand what you were asking so as I was pulling it apart, I think I understand it.

Hey, that is exactly what you are asking.

There are plenty of things that from outside perspectives we do not understand how and why things occur (a kingfisher, a humminbird, dog circling before laying, egg shell strength, etc)
But once we start to try to mimic it, we have to pry it apart in order to engineer it. This is the nature of the beast in reverse engineering.
Do we really know why an ant is so damn strong?
Do we know why whales and seals beach them selves?
Why some birds fall out of the sky?
No birds can fly and poop at the same time?

Astrolabe

Here’s a link to some talks by the guy from SFO I was talking about earlier (actually UC Berkeley) – http://www.ted.com/speakers/robert_full.html . Had the pleasure of watching one of his live presentations. He was a great presenter.

There are many other seemingly relevant hits on ted.com, like this one – http://www.ted.com/talks/michael_pawlyn_using_nature_s_genius_in_architecture.html