Designing for a world without water

Nature knows more than we do about extreme constraints. What can we learn from it?

Just yesterday morning, I went out to receive a delivery on my porch and returned with my socks soaking from the heavy fog. I curse it all summer long, living as I do in San Francisco. Interesting, isn’t it, that while there is so much hand-wringing about our 30-year drought, we are at the same time literally surrounded by water.

Simply look up into the sky at a single cloud, on average that white pouf holds 8 million gallons of water — enough to sustain 100,000 people for a day. Yet the water we harvest has become so scarce, its cost is greater than the devices invented to catch and deliver it.

All around the city we see solar and wind energy systems, rooftop gardens, and most recently, fog catchers, becoming vogue architectural accessories. An extremely cheap, recyclable kit has turned collecting your local water supply into the latest home improvement craze.

For most of us, water still comes from a very expensive faucet. But people are starting to recognize that water is all around us if we really look.

How might we imagine new ways to collect water? How do we get it off my socks and into my coffee cup?

Follow the beetle.

Photo by Harry and Rowena Kennedy CC BY

6 a.m. Somewhere in the Namib Desert

Spindly legs scuttle across the sand and dart to the top of a small ridge.

The sun peeks over the heat distorted horizon, stirring up an eastward morning wind. Orange, red, and a burning hot yellow core of the desert sun glisten across a shiny, bumpy, black shell. The beetle carefully angles itself so that its shell is a precise 45 degrees facing the wind — the most efficient angle to maximize its surface exposure to the precious moisture-laden breeze. Spiny electrostatic bumps extract particles of moisture from the breeze, consolidating them into tiny droplets between the protective bumps. Thirty kilometer per hour winds gust and the small droplets start to buckle and deform, sticking like glue to the shell. Ten minutes later the surface tension of a droplet gives way, rolling down the beetle’s waxy hydrophobic troughs towards its mouth.

0.01ml of water collected in one of the most arid and water parched places on earth.