Close your eyes for a second and imagine a place that makes you feel content, calm and happy.

Was it a chemical toilet on an industrial site? The employee break room at an Arby's? Of course not. It was probably a natural setting somewhere.

Ray Anderson, founder of carpeting giant Interface Global, asked people in the audience at the Sustainable Industries Economic Forum to imagine a place like that and raise their hand if it was a setting in nature. Nearly every hand went up.

The vote was his way of showing that biomimickry sells. People are drawn to patterns in nature. The Harvard biologist Edward Wilson even had a name for it: biophilia. It also explains the enduring allure of Joan Collins in a tiger print dress.

Interface has used these principles in carpet designs. Entropy, a line of industrial carpet based with patterns based on nature, is one of his best sellers.

It was a good speaker's gag. Feel free to try it.