Current supportive bio-inspired design methods focus on handcrafting the inspiration engineers use to speed up bio-inspired design. However promising, such methods are not scalable as the time investment is shifted to an up-front investment. Furthermore, most proposed methods require the engineer to adopt a new design process. The current study presents FISh, a scalable search method based on the standard engineering design process. By leveraging machine translation between a representative corpus of biological and engineering texts, the engineer can start the search using engineering terminology, which, behind the scenes, is automatically converted to a biological query. This conversion is done using language models trained on patents and biological publications for the engineering and biology domains. Both models are aligned using the most used English words. The biological query is used to retrieve biological documents that describe the most relevant functionality for the engineering query. The presented method allows searching for bio-inspiration using a free-text query. Furthermore, updating the underlying datasets, models and organism aspects is automated, allowing the system to stay up to date without requiring interactive effort. Finally, the search functionality is validated by comparing the search results for the functionality of existing bio-inspired designs with their inspiring organisms.

Biological solutions are often used for developing technically innovative products in a biomimetic process. However, biological solutions do not always make it into a successful technical product, e.g. due to a lack of knowledge on the mechanisms of action. A new approach is presented for transferring biological solutions based on complex mechanisms of action. It is based on mathematical optimization methods and applied to the lightweight design of the musculoskeletal system. Finally, first technical implementations in the field of robotics, among others, will be presented.

This paper chronicles and reflects on the processes and the meanings of a project of speculative design that creates a narrative based on the scientific notion of phytomining, the activity of extracting metals from the soil using plants. The paper reflects on the ability of the project of bringing together people from different expertise, as a successful case study of Speculative Design and Research through Practice. Besides the scientific and technical challenges posed by GeoMerce, the authors of this paper reflect on the critical framework that set the basis for such a complex project.

Current CE approach, and its many definitions, does not explicitly consider the interconnectedness of the biological and technological cycle. This paper uses state-of-the-art to articulate nuances of the CE to encourage a more comprehensive understanding of the concept from a perspective of both cycles. The results address that acknowledged sustainably driven shifts of resources between cycles are neglected in most state-of-the-art. Therefore, the Dual Circularity (DC) definition is proposed and further evaluated by three examples.

Much of the literature on biologically inspired design makes two, often unstated and largely unexamined, assumptions: (i) The process of biologically inspired design is independent of the biological domain, and (ii) the design process leads to multifunctional designs. In this paper, we perform a meta-analysis of 74 case studies of biologically inspired design in the Design Study Library. We begin by noting that biologically inspired design has two core processes: problem-driven design and solution-based design. We find that the first assumption about the domain independence of these design processes is questionable. Our analysis indicates that the problem-driven process of biologically inspired design is more prevalent in some domains, whereas the solution-based design process is more common in other domains. Our analysis also indicates that the solution-based process leads to multifunctional designs more often than the problem-driven process. These findings may have useful implications not only for building information-processing theories of biologically inspired design, but also for developing pedagogical techniques for teaching about the paradigm and computational tools for supporting its practice.

Current geometrical modelling approaches are unable to handle complex geometrical objects such as heterogeneous lattice structures. In this work, a framework for a novel bio-inspired geometric modelling method is proposed. The method can potentially support geometric modelling of heterogeneous lattice structures. The method utilises discretisation algorithms that are based on cell division processes encountered in nature. The method is verified on two 2D use-cases.

Tension chording is a lightweight design principle in the human motion system. More muscles than necessary are available in this system to generate motion. By using these redundant muscles the principle contributes to the lightweight design of the motion segments. The lightweight design benefits of the principle for technical structures loaded with bending torques were shown in prior studies. This paper presents a pilot study on lightweight design benefits of using tension chording for torsion loaded structures.

In solution-driven BID (sol-BID) a challenge is to identify suited applications that will benefit from the solutions principles found in nature. A well-known example of sol-BID is the self-cleaning lotus plant, that has inspired lotus paint and other coating methods. However, sol-BID is often performed by biologists with insight into the biological strategy and organism and typically only little knowledge of technical applications and design methodology. Searching for applications is therefore a challenge to many. Sol-BID has many things in common with technical application search where new applications are sought for a specific production technology or another competence characterizing a company. Experiences from technical application search could therefore form a valuable input for how to perform sol-BID. The paper presents two case studies of application search and proposes a procedure to be used in solution driven BID.

Biologically inspired design can be used to aid in conceptual design. Sketching is an important ideation process in conceptual design for recording and evaluating flashing moments of inspiration. The present study aims to provide a framework for exploring the effects of biological examples on the sketching contours of products, as well as the perceptual matching degree between design ideas generated via sketching and the desired functions. Elliptic Fourier descriptors with principal component analysis and perceptual matching were used to evaluate and compare the effects of biological examples, no examples, and human-engineered examples from different product categories and within one product category on the sketches in an experiment that involved 28 participants. The application of elliptic Fourier descriptors with principal component analysis shows that there are significant differences in the third and seventh principal components. It is also found that exposure to biological examples can produce more sketches with high perceptual matching degree than the other three conditions, but there are no significant effects of the example exposure on the Pearson correlation coefficients of semantic differential evaluation value vectors between design problems and sketches. These results demonstrate that exposure to biological examples will correlate with Elliptic Fourier descriptors of sketches and will not significantly increase the perceptual matching degree between sketches and the desired function.

Is biologically inspired design only an analogical transfer from biology to engineering? Actually, nature does not always bring “hands-on” solutions that can be analogically applied in classic engineering. Then, what are the different operations that are involved in the bioinspiration process and what are the conditions allowing this process to produce a bioinspired design? In this paper, we model the whole design process in which bioinspiration is only one element. To build this model, we use a general design theory, concept–knowledge theory, because it allows one to capture analogy as well as all other knowledge changes that lead to the design of a bioinspired solution. We ground this model on well-described examples of biologically inspired designs available in the scientific literature. These examples include Flectofin®, a hingeless flapping mechanism conceived for façade shading, and WhalePower technology, the introduction of bumps on the leading edge of airfoils to improve aerodynamic properties. Our modeling disentangles the analogical aspects of the biologically inspired design process, and highlights the expansions occurring in both knowledge bases, scientific (nonbiological) and biological, as well as the impact of these expansions in the generation of new concepts (concept partitioning). This model also shows that bioinspired design requires a special form of collaboration between engineers and biologists. Contrasting with the classic one-way transfer between biology and engineering that is assumed in the literature, the concept–knowledge framework shows that these collaborations must be “mutually inspirational” because both biological and engineering knowledge expansions are needed to reach a novel solution.

As more and more people are increasingly turning to nature for design inspiration, tools and methodologies are developed to support the systematic bioideation process. State-of-the-art approaches struggle with expanding their knowledge bases because of interactive work required by humans per biological strategy. As an answer to this persistent challenge, a scalable search for systematic biologically inspired design (SEABIRD) system is proposed. This system leverages experience from the product aspects in design by analogy tool that identifies candidate products for between-domain design by analogy. SEABIRD is based on two conceptual representations, product and organism aspects, extracted from, respectively, a patent and a biological database, that enable leveraging the ever growing body of natural-language biological texts in the systematic bioinspired design process by eliminating interactive work by humans during corpus expansion. SEABIRD's search is illustrated and validated with three well-known biologically inspired design cases.

We aim to examine the potential of using analogies in design education and to compare the roles of analogies in explaining versus inspiring in engineering design. We review existing research in analogical thinking, with a focus on scientific discourse and education. Then we explore the role of analogies in design education in making concepts more relatable by asking six participants in a graduate-level design course to generate analogies for course topics. We describe criteria developed to evaluate the analogies and present these evaluations. We then asked participants to perform divergent thinking tests, but we found no significant correlation between these and analogy scores. The participants were also asked to reflect on what constitutes an effective analog, describe their process of identifying analogies, and provide their definitions of analogies. We describe possible links between these comments and the ratings of their analogies. We then draw on results in using analogies in pedagogy to inform and reflect on obstacles we encountered in the use of analogies to inspire. Specifically, we related them to our experience with biomimetic or biologically inspired design, where we used a natural-language search approach to identify relevant analogies. Three aspects discussed are familiarity of source analogies, boundaries of parallels between source analogies and target concepts, and concreteness of source analogies. Finally, we discuss possible pedagogical benefits of eliciting analogies on course topics from students, namely, using the elicited analogies as tools for improved student engagement as well as more prompt instructor feedback.

Digital libraries of case studies of analogical design have been popular since their advent in the early 1990s. We consider four benefits of digital libraries of case studies of analogical design in the context of biologically inspired design. First, a digital library affords documentation. The 83 case studies in our work come from 8 years of extended, collaborative design projects in an interdisciplinary class on biologically inspired design. Second, a digital library provides on-demand access to the case studies. We describe a web-based library of case studies of biologically inspired design called the Design Study Library (DSL). Third, a compilation of case studies supports analyses of broader patterns and trends. As an example, an analysis of DSL's case studies found that environmental sustainability was a major factor in about a third of the case studies and an explicit design goal in about a fourth. Fourth, a digital library of case studies can support analogical learning. Preliminary results from an exploratory study indicate that DSL may support novice learning about the processes of biologically inspired design.

Biomimetic design applies biological analogies to solve design problems and has been known to produce innovative solutions. However, when designers are asked to perform biomimetic design, they often have difficulty recognizing analogies between design problems and biological phenomena. Therefore, this research aims to investigate designer behaviors that either hinder or promote the use of analogies in biomimetic design. A verbal protocol study was conducted on 30 engineering students working in small teams while participating in biomimetic design sessions. A coding scheme was developed to analyze cognitive processes involved in biomimetic design. We observed that teams were less likely to apply overall biological analogies if they tended to recall existing solutions that could be easily associated with specific superficial or functional characteristics of biological phenomena. We also found that the tendency to evaluate ideas, which reflects critical thinking, correlates with the likelihood of identifying overall biological analogies. Insights from this paper may contribute toward developing generalized methods to facilitate biomimetic design.

This paper summarizes various aspects of identifying and applying biological analogies in engineering design using a natural-language approach. To avoid the immense as well as potentially biased task of creating a biological database specifically for engineering design, the chosen approach searches biological knowledge in natural-language format, such as books and papers, for instances of keywords describing the engineering problem. Strategies developed to facilitate this search are identified, and how text descriptions of biological phenomena are used in problem solving is summarized. Several application case studies are reported to illustrate the approach. The value of the natural-language approach is demonstrated by its ability to identify relevant biological analogies that are not limited to those entered into a database specifically for engineering design.

The growing movement of biologically inspired design is driven in part by the need for sustainable development and in part by the recognition that nature could be a source of innovation. Biologically inspired design by definition entails cross-domain analogies from biological systems to problems in engineering and other design domains. However, the practice of biologically inspired design at present typically is ad hoc, with little systemization of either biological knowledge for the purposes of engineering design or the processes of transferring knowledge of biological designs to engineering problems. In this paper we present an intricate episode of biologically inspired engineering design that unfolded over an extended period of time. We then analyze our observations in terms of why, what, how, and when questions of analogy. This analysis contributes toward a content theory of creative analogies in the context of biologically inspired design.

This paper interprets the concept of biologically inspired design as understanding design based on the biological evidence. Borrowing its concept of design competence from Chomsky's definition of linguistic competence, the paper reviews biological evidence from fields including evolution, genetics, and animal behavior from the perspective of design research to propose that design competence is the product of an evolutionary history during which five key developments in cognitive evolution came together: conception unbounded by sensory perception, symbolic manipulation at a level of metarepresentation, theory of mind, curiosity, and mental time travel. These cognitive capabilities were derived from the biological evidence based upon the criteria that they are presumed to be unique to humans (Homo sapiens), they may be lost because of neurodegenerative diseases or they may fail to develop because of neurodevelopmental disorders, and they are not immediately present upon birth and develop as a child's brain matures. Based on these five capabilities, the paper concludes by discussing how computation may provide a useful way to understand the origins and evolution of design competence.