Hyunmin Cheong

Biologically Meaningful Keywords for Functional Terms of the Functional Basis

Biology is recognized as an excellent source of analogies and stimuli for engineering design. Previous work focused on the systematic identification of relevant biological analogies by searching for instances of functional keywords in biological information in natural-language format. This past work revealed that engineering keywords could not always be used to identify the most relevant biological analogies as the vocabularies between biology and engineering are sufficiently distinct. Therefore, a retrieval algorithm was developed to identify potential biologically meaningful keywords that are more effective in searching biological text than corresponding engineering keywords. In our current work, we applied and refined the retrieval algorithm to translate functional terms of the functional basis into biologically meaningful keywords. The functional basis is widely accepted as a standardized representation of engineering product functionality. Therefore, our keywords could serve as a thesaurus for engineers to find biological analogies relevant to their design problems. We also describe specific semantic relationships that can be used to identify biologically meaningful keywords in excerpts describing biological phenomena. These semantic relations were applied as criteria to identify the most useful biologically meaningful keywords. Through a preliminary validation experiment, we observed that different translators were able to apply the criteria to identify biologically meaningful keywords with a high degree of agreement to those identified by the authors. In addition, we describe how fourth-year undergraduate mechanical engineering students used the biologically meaningful keywords to develop concepts for their design projects. DOI: 10.1115/1.4003249

TRANSLATING TERMS OF THE FUNCTIONAL BASIS INTO BIOLOGICALLY MEANINGFUL KEYWORDS

Biology has long been recognized as an excellent source of analogies and stimuli for engineering design. Previous work focused on the systematic identification of relevant biological analogies by searching for instances of functional keywords in biological information in natural language format. This past work revealed that engineering keywords couldn’t always be used to identify the most relevant biological analogies, as the vocabularies between biology and engineering are sufficiently distinct. Therefore, a method of identifying biologically meaningful keywords that correspond to engineering keywords was developed. Here, we apply and refine this method by generating biologically meaningful keywords for the terms of the Functional Basis, which is widely accepted as a standardized representation of the functionality of engineering products. We present insights gained on the selection of biologically meaningful keywords for the function sets based on semantic relations. We then observe the use of our keywords by providing 4th year undergraduate design students with the biologically meaningful keywords that are related to the desired functions of their design projects.Copyright

Automatic Extraction of Causally Related Functions From Natural-Language Text for Biomimetic Design

Identifying relevant analogies from biology is a significant challenge in biomimetic design. Our naturallanguage approach addresses this challenge by developing techniques to search biological information in naturallanguage format, such as books or papers. This paper presents the application of natural-language processing techniques, such as part-of-speech tags, typed-dependency parsing, and syntactic patterns, to automatically extract and categorize causally related functions from text with biological information. Causally related functions, which specify how one action is enabled by another action, are considered important for both knowledge representation used to model biological information and analogical transfer of biological information performed by designers. An extraction algorithm was developed and scored F-measures of 0.78-0.85 in an initial development test. Because this research approach uses inexpensive and domain-independent techniques, the extraction algorithm has the potential to automatically identify patterns of causally related functions from a large amount of text that contains either biological or design information.

Sensing in nature: using biomimetics for design of sensors

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to illustrate how biomimetics can be applied in sensor design. Biomimetics is an engineering discipline that uses nature as an inspiration source for generating ideas for how to solve engineering problems. The paper reviews a number of biomimetic studies of sense organs in animals and illustrates how a formal search method developed at University of Toronto can be applied to sensor design.Design/methodology/approach – Using biomimetics involves a search for relevant cases, a proper analysis of the biological solutions, identification of design principles and design of the desired artefact. The present search method is based on formulation of relevant keywords and search for occurrences in a standard university biology textbook. Most often a simple formulation of keywords and a following search is not enough to generate a sufficient amount of useful ideas or the search gives too many results. This is handled by a more advanced search strategy where the search is eithe...

Understanding Analogical Reasoning in Biomimetic Design: An Inductive Approach

This paper reports insights gained from observing groups of novice designers apply biological analogies to solve design problems. We recorded the discourse of fourth-year mechanical engineering students during biomimetic design sessions. We observed that the availability of associations from superficial or functional characteristics of biological knowledge led to fixation, which affected the designers’ ability to identify the relevant analogy. In addition, even after identifying the analogy, the designers fixated on mapping irrelevant characteristics of biological knowledge, instead of developing additional solutions based on the previously detected analogy. The paper also presents initial work towards quantifying analogical reasoning in a design study.

Effective Analogical Transfer Using Biological Descriptions Retrieved With Functional and Biologically Meaningful Keywords

While biology is well recognized as a good source of analogies for engineering design, the steps of 1) retrieving relevant analogies and 2) applying these analogies are not trivial. Our recent work translated the functional terms of the Functional Basis into biologically meaningful keywords that can help engineers search for and retrieve relevant biological phenomena for design, addressing step 1 above. This paper reports progress towards step 2: identifying and overcoming obstacles to effective analogical transfer and application of biological descriptions retrieved with functional and biologically meaningful keywords. This work revealed that the presence of, and ease of recognizing, causal relations (relationships between two actions where one causes another) in biological descriptions plays a key role in the quality of analogical transfers. We observed that novice designers found it difficult to correctly transfer analogies when they could not easily recognize the causal relations present in biological descriptions. Two major factors that rendered this recognition difficult were: 1) a large number of action words appearing in the descriptions, and 2) key action words being used in the passive voice. To overcome these factors, we propose a template that guides designers to 1) recognize the relevant causal relations in biological descriptions and 2) focus on the functional elements of the causal relations.Copyright

Confirmation and Cognitive Bias in Design Cognition

The desire to better understand design cognition has led to the application of literature from psychology to design research, e.g., in learning, analogical reasoning, and problem solving. Psychological research on cognitive heuristics and biases offers another relevant body of knowledge for application. Cognitive biases are inherent biases in human information processing, which can lead to suboptimal reasoning. Cognitive heuristics are unconscious rules utilized to enhance the efficiency of information processing and are possible antecedents of cognitive biases. This paper presents two studies that examined the role of confirmation bias, which is a tendency to seek and interpret evidence in order to confirm existing beliefs. The results of the first study, a protocol analysis involving novice designers engaged in a biomimetic design task, indicate that confirmation bias is present during concept generation and offer additional insights into the influence of confirmation bias in design. The results of the second study, a controlled experiment requiring participants to complete a concept evaluation task, suggest that decision matrices are effective tools to reduce confirmation bias during concept evaluation.Copyright

Extraction and Transfer of Biological Analogies for Creative Concept Generation

Biomimetic design, which borrows ideas from nature to solve engineering problems, has been identified as a promising method of concept generation. However, there are still many challenges. Previous research has revealed that novice designers have difficulties in extracting the analogical strategy present in biological phenomena and mapping the strategy even if the strategy is provided. This research, therefore, attempts to develop tools that could assist novice designers to execute effective biomimetic design and ultimately generate creative concepts. In particular, we investigated the use of tools developed by the authors: 1) a causal relation template that helps retrieve relevant strategies from biological descriptions and 2) instructional mapping rules that aid structural mapping of the strategies to design concepts and abstraction of the enabling functions of the strategies. We found that the participants who used both tools generated concepts with significant correlation between the correctness of analogical transfer and creativity of the concepts. This effect was not observed for the participants who only used the first tool, mainly because of the participants’ inability to explore enabling solutions for the applied biological strategy and generate concepts that are wholly developed. To encourage generation of creative ideas in biomimetic design, the tools must be devised to facilitate abstraction of biological strategies, enable effective mapping of strategies from biology to engineering, and discourage design fixation.Copyright

Effects of Abstraction on Selecting Relevant Biological Phenomena for Biomimetic Design

The natural-language approach to identifying biological analogies exploits the existing format of much biological knowledge, beyond databases created for biomimetic design. However, designers may need to select analogies from search results, during which biases may exist toward: specific words in descriptions of biological phenomena, familiar organisms and scales, and strategies that match preconceived solutions. Therefore, we conducted two experiments to study the effect of abstraction on overcoming these biases and selecting biological phenomena based on analogical similarities. Abstraction in our experiments involved replacing biological nouns with hypernyms. The first experiment asked novice designers to choose between a phenomenon suggesting a highly useful strategy for solving a given problem, and another suggesting a less-useful strategy, but featuring bias elements. The second experiment asked novice designers to evaluate the relevance of two biological phenomena that suggest similarly useful strategies to solve a given problem. Neither experiment demonstrated the anticipated benefits of abstraction. Instead, our abstraction led to: (1) participants associating nonabstracted words to design problems and (2) increased difficulty in understanding descriptions of biological phenomena. We recommend investigating other ways to implement abstraction when developing similar tools or techniques that aim to support biomimetic design.

Design problem solving with biological analogies: A verbal protocol study

Abstract 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.