Biologically Inspired Design: Methods and Validation

Abstract

Design inspired by nature, bionic design, biomimetism, biomimicry, or biologically inspired design, despite having been a source of inspiration for design activities for a long time, have recently, under pressure from sustainability concerns, gained a role as part of a standard set of approaches to deal with design problems. Nature provides an important model to find solutions to the ecological crisis. The aim of this chapter is to establish a comparison among a set of design methods, meant to guide industrial designers in carrying out activities leading to bio-inspired design. The results of literature review are presented, with emphasis drawn on existing documented approaches to design inspired by nature, and the presentation of the methods, on which a comparative analysis is established. The parameters for the comparative analysis are set out, based on five general goals that are considered applicable to design problems, within the realm of industrial design. The presentation and explanation of the comparisons is followed by a discussion on their implications for theory and practice. The present day’s urgency in achieving environmental sustainability has promoted renewed interest on gathering inspiration from nature in order to create novel design concepts. Design endeavours in several technical disciplines may lead to ground-breaking new concepts when natural systems are considered as a source of inspiration. The focus of this chapter is on joining a bio-inspired approach to the creation of industrial design engineering concepts with a systematic approach to design. The conduction of industrial design engineering projects is inherently structured and supported by methods set forth in the systematic design literature (e.g. Hales 1991, Hubka & Eder 1992, Roozenburg & Eekels 1995, Pahl & Beitz 1996, Ulrich & Eppinger 2004). Hence, in order to be useful and of practical value to the generation of industrial design engineering concepts, bio-inspired design methods should be able to fit into design endeavours that follow a systematic approach to design. The main purpose of bionics is to carry out a benchmark of nature, of what it created, tested and has evolved over millions of years, in order to improve what man creates artificially (Benyus 1997). A number of design methods, intended especially to guide industrial designers in carrying out the development of biologically inspired design, have been proposed. The chapter establishes a comparative analysis between five methods, retrieved from literature. The methods are presented in similar depth, and the parameters of analysis