Hi and welcome to my first article and, of course, to the blog itself. I was thinking a lot of my first try to write something down, but in the end I just started and watched what I have done.

Maybe… the most important part in an article like is the aim or goal of it and today I want to talk about what happened that I start writing a blog:

The website:

During my studies of Bionik/Biomimetics in Energy Systems in Villach/Austria I had hands on several projects and saw many different topics also from my colleagues and senior students. After finishing the studies, right in the final phase of my master thesis (later article will be about the thesis) I was a bit stuttering about the purpose of it.

Will someone read it?

Is there any use of it?

Are all people crazy like me and read the old master thesis from my old senior fellows?

If not… For whom I write?

Yes, yes I know. I did it for me and a bit for my company at this time (yes, they supported me very well). But that can’t be all. After that I realized the work that my fellows and I put in our topics and how hard it was to get the necessary background information. Honestly, try to find biomimetic related articles online! Ok we have asknature.org, which is a very nice website, but it is not that useful if you try to figure out if something was done on your own “new” topic. In the end we all sat in the library or on our notebooks to search the internet databases for more information.

Small personal statement: I wished that the modern scientific world were not behind walls out of credit cards and university access limitations… knowledge for free is the way to go… #aaronswartz

So yes, so I talked with my friends and fellows to create a homepage. Here we can write about our ideas and which work we had done to become a master for one of our favorite hobbies.

The Blog:

Hmm, which would be the best format to write with your own words about a topic you like and simultaneously you can transport your experience in a way that everyone can have access to it? Yep, a blog. We all here are academics! And…? Nothing! That only means that we have a certain understanding in the things we research, but it doesn’t mean that we are only writing articles in scientific form. No, everyone writes in his own style. Of course, we can’t start writing about stuff without knowing our sources and this is actually the only thing on what we all have an eye on and that is the correct bibliography of our sources, images and so on. This is the base of the whole blog idea.

Write about biomimetic topics that you like, in a way that you like, but make sure that someone else can use ideas and sources out of the articles for own research.

The database:

Finally I want to add a small part which I’d like to tell the “database”. As mentioned before, the actual research for ideas and specific topics in the field of biomimetics is really tough and it is hard to figure out if something was done on a specific topic. So I hope we can establish this blog as a help for others to find new interesting topics. Maybe we can start a cooperation… You see, I just want to start networking.

The future:

We just started here with this small (fancy named) website and keep writing will sometimes be really hard, but I think we all can manage it. Also we are still connected with our alma mater and hopefully we can use this connection to generate extra content in form of interviews, reviews and guest articles by new students.

*wave*,

Jan