- Welcome to the Edna W. Lawrence Nature Lab at the Rhode Island School of Design.

My name is Jen Bissonnette, and I'm the interim director of the lab.

(whimsical music) So the building that we're in right now was RISD back in 1877.

So this beautiful brick building on Waterman Avenue was the entirety of the Rhode Island School of Design.

And in 1937, this became the studio space for one of the professors here, Edna Lawrence, hence the name of the lab.

(whimsical music) She taught nature drawing in this classroom.

And her thinking was that if ever you were at a loss for what to do with one of your projects, that nature could serve as endless inspiration in terms of color and form and pattern and structure.

(whimsical music) Edna Lawrence, she definitely marched to the beat of her own drummer, thankfully.

And there's stories that she actually at one point stowed away on a barge.

She was so eager to get to these other countries that she found any way that she could as a woman to book her passage to get to these incredible destinations.

When Edna left, there were about 20,000 specimens in the collection, and now we say there's somewhere between 90 and 100,000 specimens.

(whimsical music) The Nature Lab is in this funny kind of a space, right?

It reads a little bit like a natural history museum, except it is a little bit more like a lending library.

Most of the things in this collection don't have, what we call, a red dot on them.

If it's a red dot, you can't check it out, like my friend the bear here, he can't be checked out.

But other things you can check out just like you would a library book.

Students take the specimens, they take them back to their dorm rooms or their studio and they're able to really explore them and apply them into their projects in whatever way they want to.

- Hello, I'm Benedict Gagliardi.

I'm the staff biologist and collections manager at the RISD Nature Lab.

(whimsical music) In addition to all the preserved and dried specimens that we have, which is the majority of what we have here, there's been a long history of having live animals as well.

To my left here is our resident corn snake.

Hey!

We do occasionally get found escaped pets and things like that from various dorms on campus.

Recently we got a small snake, the same type of snake, a corn snake.

A plumber on campus walked into the lab with it in a cardboard box and said, "I found this escaped in one of the dorms and thought you were the people to deal with it."

(laughs) - So one of the interesting creatures we have here at the Nature Lab is our Axolotl Gulliver.

They're actually critically endangered in their natural habitat, which is in Mexico City.

It's just one lake in Mexico City where they're found naturally.

Hi.

But they're very, very widespread globally because they're used in labs for a number of different purposes, one of which is to study limb regeneration.

So these guys can actually lose an arm or a leg and grow it back again.

And I thought, well, this will be interesting.

I'll see if I can grow an axolotl.

And basically we wound up with 24 full grown axolotls at the end.

So we had a little bit of an axolotl overabundance, which we, we found them all really good homes.

Okay, so let's head over to the bone room.

So here we are in the bone room, and this is obviously a collection of bones, internal skeletons and exoskeletons.

(whimsical music) You know, one of the things that I find exciting about this collection is it probably is the space that highlights most what we're trying to do in terms of biomimicry.

Biomimicry is looking to the natural world for design solutions.

So thinking about the 3.8 billion years of evolution that life has been on this planet, there are a lot of pressures that have been solved by organisms over time that we as designers can look to for inspiration of how to solve some of the design problems that we're facing.

(whimsical music) So welcome to the imaging lab.

When Edna Lawrence left in 1977, the one thing that she said when she was going out the door was, there'd be a whole new array of things to explore if we could see them at different scales.

(whimsical music) So for example, using the high speed video camera, there's some images on the screen back there that show how a dragonfly's wing, when it's raining, the water falls on the wing, beads up, and rolls right off of the wing.

So then students came over and used the scanning electron microscope to see what those microstructures of the wing are that allow it to have that hydrophobic surface.

So the collection is always changing.

Students will send things from their travels as well, and we even sometimes get mystery boxes.

So that's always a fun opportunity too, to know that the students are thinking of us, but also potentially to add to the collection.

So the collection is always growing.

(bright music)