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Feral by Design
Feral by Design
Author: Pia Williams
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© 2025 Feral by Design
Description
Feral by Design is a podcast stealing nature’s smartest strategies for our everyday chaos. Short, playful episodes grounded in real science, told through messy, self-deprecating stories. Some dive into real-world examples, others explore fresh frameworks inspired by nature. It's Biomimicry with the door left open: smart ideas from nature, made relatable, practical, and surprisingly fun. Nature owns the patent - we get to copy it.
23 Episodes
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A pre-Christmas Dopa Drop — one of twelve tiny, under-60-second December dopamine hits from Feral by Design. A short, deliberate experiment playing with different dopamine triggers and pacing across the mini series — so the style shifts on purpose. Not a biomimicry episode — just quick, nature-tinted perspective for the days when December does December. If one of these gives you a lift, please share it with someone else in December mode. 🎧 feralbydesign.com | @feralbydesignpod | Created and ...
A pre-Christmas Dopa Drop — one of twelve tiny, under-60-second December dopamine hits from Feral by Design. A short, deliberate experiment playing with different dopamine triggers and pacing across the mini series — so the style shifts on purpose. Not a biomimicry episode — just quick, nature-tinted perspective for the days when December does December. If one of these gives you a lift, please share it with someone else in December mode. 🎧 feralbydesign.com | @feralbydesignpod | Created and ...
A pre-Christmas Dopa Drop — one of twelve tiny, under-60-second December dopamine hits from Feral by Design. A short, deliberate experiment playing with different dopamine triggers and pacing across the mini series — so the style shifts on purpose. Not a biomimicry episode — just quick, nature-tinted perspective for the days when December does December. If one of these gives you a lift, please share it with someone else in December mode. 🎧 feralbydesign.com | @feralbydesignpod | Created and ...
A pre-Christmas Dopa Drop — one of twelve tiny, under-60-second December dopamine hits from Feral by Design. A short, deliberate experiment playing with different dopamine triggers and pacing across the mini series — so the style shifts on purpose. Not a biomimicry episode — just quick, nature-tinted perspective for the days when December does December. If one of these gives you a lift, please share it with someone else in December mode. 🎧 feralbydesign.com | @feralbydesignpod | Created and ...
A pre-Christmas Dopa Drop — one of twelve tiny, under-60-second December dopamine hits from Feral by Design. A short, deliberate experiment playing with different dopamine triggers and pacing across the mini series — so the style shifts on purpose. Not a biomimicry episode — just quick, nature-tinted perspective for the days when December does December. If one of these gives you a lift, please share it with someone else in December mode. 🎧 feralbydesign.com | @feralbydesignpod | Created and ...
A pre-Christmas Dopa Drop — one of twelve tiny, under-60-second December dopamine hits from Feral by Design. A short, deliberate experiment playing with different dopamine triggers and pacing across the mini series — so the style shifts on purpose. Not a biomimicry episode — just quick, nature-tinted perspective for the days when December does December. If one of these gives you a lift, please share it with someone else in December mode. 🎧 feralbydesign.com | @feralbydesignpod | Created and ...
A pre-Christmas Dopa Drop — one of twelve tiny, under-60-second December dopamine hits from Feral by Design. A short, deliberate experiment playing with different dopamine triggers and pacing across the mini series — so the style shifts on purpose. Not a biomimicry episode — just quick, nature-tinted perspective for the days when December does December. If one of these gives you a lift, please share it with someone else in December mode. 🎧 feralbydesign.com | @feralbydesignpod | Created and ...
A pre-Christmas Dopa Drop — one of twelve tiny, under-60-second December dopamine hits from Feral by Design. A short, deliberate experiment playing with different dopamine triggers and pacing across the mini series — so the style shifts on purpose. Not a biomimicry episode — just quick, nature-tinted perspective for the days when December does December. If one of these gives you a lift, please share it with someone else in December mode. 🎧 feralbydesign.com | @feralbydesignpod | Created and ...
The second episode in the Feral Festive Special drifts into unexpected territory: snowflakes. This episode isn’t biomimicry — snowflakes don’t behave — but the pattern they form, shaped by whatever air they fall through, is the part we’re playing with today. December has its own weather system: family dynamics, big tables, small tables, solo days, first holidays after loss, chaotic joy, quiet overwhelm — often all within the same week. And for some reason, we keep trying to control the ...
A pre-Christmas Dopa Drop — one of twelve tiny, under-60-second December dopamine hits from Feral by Design. A short, deliberate experiment playing with different dopamine triggers and pacing across the mini series — so the style shifts on purpose. Not a biomimicry episode — just quick, nature-tinted perspective for the days when December does December. If one of these gives you a lift, please share it with someone else in December mode. 🎧 feralbydesign.com | @feralbydesignpod | Created and ...
A pre-Christmas Dopa Drop — one of twelve tiny, under-60-second December dopamine hits from Feral by Design. A short, deliberate experiment playing with different dopamine triggers and pacing across the mini series — so the style shifts on purpose. Not a biomimicry episode — just quick, nature-tinted perspective for the days when December does December. If one of these gives you a lift, please share it with someone else in December mode. 🎧 feralbydesign.com | @feralbydesignpod | Created and ...
A pre-Christmas Dopa Drop — one of twelve tiny, under-60-second December dopamine hits from Feral by Design. A short, deliberate experiment playing with different dopamine triggers and pacing across the mini series — so the style shifts on purpose. Not a biomimicry episode — just quick, nature-tinted perspective for the days when December does December. If one of these gives you a lift, please share it with someone else in December mode. 🎧 feralbydesign.com | @feralbydesignpod | Created and ...
A pre-Christmas Dopa Drop — one of twelve tiny, under-60-second December dopamine hits from Feral by Design. A short, deliberate experiment playing with different dopamine triggers and pacing across the mini series — so the style shifts on purpose. Not a biomimicry episode — just quick, nature-tinted perspective for the days when December does December. If one of these gives you a lift, please share it with someone else in December mode. 🎧 feralbydesign.com | @feralbydesignpod | Created and ...
Part 1 of the Feral Festive Special: the prawn. Yes, really. This festive run goes rogue - nature-inspired, not biomimicry - a deliberately Feral detour for December's chaos. We're diving into the prawn's soft-shell phase: that blink-and-you-miss-it moment where they ditch their old shell, stretch like hell, and grow before anyone notices. Chaotic. Unprotected. Maximum transformation. Tell me that's not peak December energy. If you're rolling into the end of the year feeling overcooked, under...
Ever taken a course, nailed the theory… and then fallen apart the moment it gets real? Same. And it turns out the fix lives in the Kalahari. In this episode, Pia heads into meerkat country to uncover a quietly brilliant system for learning that actually sticks under pressure - not just in your head, but in your bones. No hacks. No feel-good fluff. Just nature-tested design principles for building capability in the real world, without the chaos or the panic. From small “reality bites” to why p...
Ever felt that tiny stab of guilt when you toss a takeaway coffee cup into the bin, even when you’re trying to do the right thing? In this episode, Pia takes that everyday eco-anxiety somewhere unexpected: underwater, to the mussel - a creature that quietly solves problems we’ve been wrestling with for decades. From its renewable anchor threads comes a provocative idea for a different kind of cup altogether. Not disposable. Not forever. But something in between: a retiring cup, designed to a...
Ever been swooped by a magpie? Turns out, you weren’t being attacked — you were being communicated with. And you probably missed the whole conversation. Magpies avoid real fighting through communication — using graduated conflict signals to regulate tension and maintain social balance. They’ve mastered something we humans rarely do: tiered cues, pattern-based memory, and conflict used as maintenance rather than meltdown. In this episode, Pia uses biomimicry to explore how we can handle tensio...
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 trip, and a microscope moment that turned frustration into a global, nature-inspired design rev...
Ever felt like you’re the bottleneck — the one brain trying to juggle every moving piece until the whole thing collapses? In this episode, Pia shares a true story of running a chaotic innovation project in India… while accidentally locked in a toilet with no reception. That moment of enforced stillness led her to one of nature’s best system designers: the octopus. Two-thirds of an octopus’s neurons live in its arms, allowing it to sense, decide, and adapt without waiting for head office — a s...
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 researchers and product designers re-thinking needles, medicine, and even human ingenuity. It’s ...





