Roots

In our quest of designing a system to collect and distribute water, the most logical but also most interesting design can be found in nature: Roots!

Have you ever wondered how nature actually provides water and nutrients across several meters below the surface to several meters up the air? Well I haven't, and thus I just had to find out if we could maybe use the same system to collect and transport our water.

What is interesting to note, is that roots do not function alone: They depend on fungi and bacteriae to perform optimally and help them absorb and degrade organic material to use for nutrients.
They are even able to absorb water from the moist air; for example Orchidaceae don't need soil to grow: They try to harvest everything from their surroundings (like droplets of water that flow across other trees and absorp small amounts of nutrients)

It would be wonderful if we could tap into the knowledge of the nature's pipeline and find it out how we could design our water to be purified, transported and stored just like evolution has discovered a long time ago.

Sebastien Moitzheim , Franziska Scheuermann , Mark-Michael Weltzl