VIDEO INTERVIEW: Steve Sammartino is an inspiration to interview. From a personal point of view, it’s immensely refreshing to find a futurist who you might expect to be deeply embedded in technology, productivity and new ways of working, to be focused so strongly on a world order based on sustainability and biomimicry.
Sammartino, who addressed the huge ARBS, the airconditioning and building management systems event in Melbourne last week, comes with a strong media background that includes television, keynotes delivered in 40 countries and technology commentary.
At ARBS, Sammartino addressed people clearly focused on finding the best physical and digital technologies that can advance their business or organisational offer – all in the context of a highly competitive environment.
“What we want to do is use our technology to empower tradespeople to get more done and get that productivity element that Australia’s been missing for a long time,” he told The Fifth Estate in an interview after his keynote.
We do things a “little bit cheaper and a little bit faster,” he says. But there’s a much bigger leap to take by looking at the practical applications of nature based systems. This includes understanding how biomimicry can solve our problems, the way nature has demonstrated over billions of years, and how to be transformational.
For instance, there’s the power of nature to create a battery, which is essentially moving energy from one place to another. His friend did this with two dams he built at different levels of a hill. During the day, solar power pumps water to the top dam, and at night, the water runs down the hill, generating energy to power a house.
Sammartino also has a keen understanding of the built environment. He’s developing a 3D house-printing business and is encouraged by the efficiencies it offers.
“You can go 24 hours a day. You don’t need a huge amount of skill to be able to operate the machine. So what it does is it opens up the potential to help solve the housing crisis.”
Can it offer better, faster solutions than, say, modular construction?
What we need, he says, is a range of solutions. And regulations, that he says can lead to innovation.
“I think that the number one thing any government can do to change something is to remember regulation.” In the right areas it can create innovation, he says.
It’s not red tape. You only have to look at road safety with the introduction of .05 drink driving limits.
“That’s positive regulation creating change. We can do the same thing with the environment, with energy and with startups.
“We’re talking about regulation that makes big companies and small companies move towards a new and better technology. And, you know, that does? It creates jobs too, creates opportunity.”
We need an ecosystem
“We need to build an ecosystem for the built environment – new materials with different manufacturing methods, prefabrication, robotics on-site, humanoid robots…all of it.”
The technologies then need to be paired with the other elements making up the ecosystem, such as how to fund growth industries, provide jobs for tomorrow and address environmental concerns.
AI can also help solve many problems. For instance, it could modify building design to account for different weather zones.
But first, we need to take a hard look at nature and learn from it.
Nature tells us energy can be generated by a huge range of elements – from fossil fuels to wind, solar, hydro and tidal and it also has a lot of different ways that it can be stored.
Batteries, essentially, simply transfer energy from one side to another.
“Nature already told us the answers. It’s about time we started listening to nature, because nature has had 3.4 billion years of split (A/B) testing, and we’ve been burning fossil fuels for 200 years. That’s how far behind we are on nature, on learning. So, I call it biomimicry.”
