The product leads the transition
People change when they are offered something they want. The electric car proved it.
Company
Mattara Energy + Motion
A design company that learns from the folding wings of insects to make products, places and systems that collect their own energy, designed with nature, not against it.
One line of research
From a design thesis to a company
2003
A product-led transition
An industrial design thesis argues that clean transport will arrive sooner if it is led by products people want than by waiting on infrastructure and policy, and abstracts the folding wings of five Australian insects into deployable solar surfaces.
2003–2025
The argument is tested
Electric cars spread because people wanted them. Solar becomes the cheapest electricity there is. The one constraint that does not move is area: a vehicle body cannot carry enough cells. Flat solar cars fail on exactly that.
2026
The Mattara Treatise
The work is rebuilt as a bionic design theory: eight insect fold types measured from public-domain plates, five levels of abstraction, an energy model for ten Australian cities, and a typology of applications.
Next
From design to engineering
Three wing types to working prototypes at one-fifth scale: a tented surface on a turning hub, the earwig fan, and a shell over a fold. Each must prove that it opens, holds and closes every day, and that it collects far more than it spends.
Six principles
What the products must do
Desire, driven by design, moves the market, and policy follows. The principles are what twenty-three years of watching that happen taught us.
Sustainable without trade-offs
Buyers have never paid more to give something up. A clean product has to be better, not just cleaner.
Harvest energy from the surroundings
Products that gather the energy they use, from sun and later wind, rather than waiting on a supply.
Area is the limit; geometry is the lever
Solar cells are cheap and good. What a product lacks is surface. Folding gives it more.
Nature has solved the fold
Insects have opened and stowed large surfaces reliably for 300 million years. Start there.
Design people fall for
Desire moves markets and policy follows. The form has to be wanted, and it has to have a reason anyone can see.
Workstreams
What we are working on
Engineer the fold
The mechanics of each fold type, from laboratory and slow-motion video to working prototypes at one-fifth scale.
Model energy
What a wing is worth, city by city: sun tracking, heat carried away through vein-like channels, and the gains as cells improve.
Design language
Two forms, venation, membrane, shell, unfolding and place, applied across everything Mattara makes.
Energy sharing
Products that pass energy to each other and to the places they stop, as social insects pass food.
The controller
An autonomous controller for wings and energy, on the dragonfly’s architecture: sensing, attention, prediction, reflexes.
Wind
Organic blades in place of purely geometric ones, and portable wind power that travels folded and opens on site.
Talk to us
Researchers, engineers, makers and investors
The design studies are not public yet. If you would like to see them, or to work with us on the fold, the energy or the theory, write to us.