Feral by Design

Hooked: How Burrs Inspired Velcro -  and Why Curiosity Is The Real Innovation. Ever spent an hour on your kitchen floor pulling burrs out of your dog’s fur while questioning your life choices? Those annoying little hitchhikers accidentally sparked one of the most successful biomimicry stories in history, the invention of Velcro. In this episode, Pia unpicks the legend: a Swiss engineer, a hunting...

Ever felt like you’re the bottleneck, the one brain everything has to run through until the whole thing grinds to a halt? In the middle of a chaotic innovation project in India, Pia found herself locked in a basement toilet with no reception, cut off from the team, the decisions, and the work itself. And just like that, everything stalled. This episode sits inside that moment, when one point of co...

Tips for Dam Good Boundaries You know you’ve hit rock bottom when you’re jealous of a rodent’s boundary skills. This week on Feral by Design , Pia Williams dives into the muddy brilliance of the beaver — nature’s original boundary engineer — to find smarter, saner ways to hold your own. Discover: Why most human boundaries snap under pressure (hint: we make them too rigid) How beavers build layered...

When you were a kid, did you ever get jabbed with a needle so big it felt like a medieval weapon? I did — the kind that left welts and trauma in equal measure. Turns out, the real master of painless penetration was buzzing around my head the whole time. This episode of Feral by Design dives into what mosquitoes know about pain-free design — and how their six-part mouthpiece has inspired biomimicry...

Nature owns the patent. We get to copy it. Not another true-crime podcast… unless you count Grand Theft Bio!  In this 6-minute intro, Pia shares why she’s obsessed with stealing nature’s best strategies - a little biomimicry, a little human curiosity - and what listeners can expect from this podcast that makes nature and science feel personal and surprisingly useful. Expect short episodes that ble...

Feral by Design: Stealing nature's smartest strategies to solve human challenges. I'm Pia, an innovation strategist and biomimicry practitioner. Every fortnight, we explore how 3.8 billion years of evolution can help us tackle modern problems—from team communication and conflict to setting better boundaries. Short episodes grounded in science and storytelling. Wild enough to make you lau...