Sydney podcaster wins two global podcast awards, one with help from a dancing spider and a brainless slime mould

Pia Williams had no mailing list and a podcast less than a year old. When Feral by Design was named a finalist in the international Signal Awards, it was entered automatically into a public vote, and it was running fourth in its category, in single digits, with the leader on 50 to 60 per cent of the vote.

So Williams did what her podcast does every episode: she asked nature for a strategy.

Four days later, Feral by Design had won the Listener’s Choice Award. The Signal Awards Judging Academy, an international panel of podcast industry figures, separately awarded it Silver in the same category. Feral by Design appears to be the first dedicated biomimicry podcast to win a major international podcast award.

In a new episode out now, Williams explains how two unlikely teachers shaped her Listener’s Choice campaign: an Australian peacock spider and a slime mould.

The male peacock spider, the size of a grain of rice, courts in two ways: a showy dance up front, and quiet vibrations through the ground. Williams did not copy the spider; she borrowed the strategy, one loud channel and one quiet one. Two public posts put the spider front and centre, while behind the scenes she sent personal messages one by one.

“The public posts got attention, but it was almost always the quiet personal message that got someone to actually vote,” Williams said.

The slime mould, a brainless single cell, sends out feelers in every direction and then strengthens only the paths that find food. Williams contacted many groups, put her energy into the ones that responded, and pulled back from the ones that went quiet. Before long, people were passing the campaign on without being asked.

“By the end, people had stopped asking how I was going and started asking how we were going,” she said. “The network was making connections I hadn’t designed. Messages were coming back to me from Paris, Singapore, Baku and Beijing, and I had lost track of who was carrying them.”

Williams researches, writes, hosts and produces Feral by Design from Sydney’s Inner West. The show explores biomimicry: studying how living systems solve problems and applying those strategies to human challenges. It is better known in architecture and engineering than in everyday life, which is the gap the show sets out to close. Episodes have looked at what beavers can teach the London Underground about flood control, what an ant colony knows about when to stop, the lizard venom behind Ozempic, and goats as bushfire fuel reduction, from a naval base on Sydney Harbour to a CFA trial in Wodonga.

Unusually for the field, Williams does not only report biomimicry that others have taken to market. In some episodes she applies it herself, on air, to behaviours, processes and her own concepts. The awards campaign is one. Another is the Mussel Concept, an original and as yet unbuilt design for a takeaway coffee cup coated inside and out with a mussel-inspired biodegradable protein, so it survives a dozen or so dishwasher cycles and then composts, with no deposit scheme, app or special bin required. She calls it the retiring cup: designed to age gracefully. A third is a firefly-inspired concept for people caring for someone with dementia.

“Nature has 3.8 billion years of research and development behind her, and most people have never heard the word biomimicry,” Williams said. “The Solopreneur category is for people who research, write, record, produce and promote the whole thing on their own, so winning it says something considered pretty niche might have a broader appeal than people think. That is the whole point of the show.”

You can listen to “A Dancing Spider, a Slime Mould and an Unlikely Awards Win” here.