Joanna Tsenn

Methods for Supporting Bioinspired Design

Bioinspired design, the use of nature to inspire solutions to engineering problems, is a powerful approach for innovation but is generally practiced on an ad hoc basis. Only recently, however, have researchers sought to develop formal tools and principles to effectively tap the wealth of design solutions found within nature. Research efforts in applying design tools such as the Theory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ), functional modeling, and keyword searches to bioinspired design are summarized in this paper. The efforts to develop effective tools to search biological information for design inspiration are also discussed. This paper presents a case study where BioTRIZ, functional modeling, and bio-keyword searches were taught in a weekend-long workshop to working professionals in the process of obtaining their graduate degrees. The students were then given a project to re-engineer a product using the bioinspired methods. An analysis of their reports is given that discusses student success in implementing bioinspired design methods and student feedback on the methods.Copyright

Evaluating Methods for Bioinspired Concept Generation

Bioinspired design, the practice of using biological organisms and systems to inspire the design of engineering systems, has traditionally been performed without the use of systematic tools or methods to aid the designer. In recent years however, several tools have been developed to help designers effectively use bioinspiration for engineering design. These methods include BioTRIZ, functional modeling, biological keyword searches, and online repositories such as Asknature.org. This paper briefly reviews some of these methods and presents the summary of three studies that offer empirical examinations of those methods. In two studies the methods are taught and used by groups of graduate-level engineering students. The successes and difficulties that the students encountered using the bioinspired design methods are discussed and evaluated. Additionally, a third controlled study examines a group of undergraduate mechanical engineering students with no formal training in ideation methods. The students were given one of two design problems and instructed to either generate ideas or to generate ideas while considering how nature might solve the problem. This controlled study allows a quantitative analysis of ad hoc approaches to bioinspired design.

Evaluating the Directed Method for Bioinspired Design

Bioinspired design, the practice of looking to nature to find inspiration for engineering design, is becoming an increasingly desired approach to design. It allows designers to tap a wealth of time-tested solutions to difficult problems in a domain rarely considered by designers. Only recently have researchers developed organized, systematic methods for bioinspired design. These methods include BioTRIZ, an extension of functional modeling for bioinspired design, engineering-to-biology keyword translation tools, and specialized design tools like DANE and SAPPHIRE. These organized methods are currently active research efforts. Traditionally, however, bioinspired design has been conducted without the benefit of any organized method. Without the support of formal methods, designers have relied on the “directed method” of bioinspired design. The directed method approach simply directs designers to consider how nature might approach a problem in order to help designers find solutions. This paper presents an experiment to explore the impact upon idea generation of simply contemplating how nature would solve a design problem. This experiment is foundationally important to bioinspired engineering design method research. The results of this experiment serve as a fundamental baseline and benchmark for the comparison of more systematic, and often more involved, bioinspired design methods.A group of 121 novice designers are given one of two design problems and instructed to either generate solutions using the “directed method,” considering how nature would solve the problem, or to generate solutions without being prompted to use any method. Based on the findings presented here, the directed method offers designers no advantage in the average number of non-redundant ideas the designers can produce, the average quality of their solutions, the average solution novelty, or the variety of solutions proposed. Overall, this investigation finds no significant difference in idea generation between the directed method and the control condition. In conclusion, systematic and organized methods for bioinspired design should instead be sought to effectively leverage nature’s design knowledge.Copyright

Teaching Students to Innovate: Evaluating Methods for Bioinspired Design and Their Impact on Design Self Efficacy

Bioinspired design is becoming an increasingly popular approach that makes use of nature as a source of inspiration to develop designs. Tools and methods are currently being evaluated to determine how designers may best leverage biological systems to generate designs. In this paper we present a study in an engineering elective course at Texas A&M University that explores the effects of five different methods for bioinspired design on the quality and quantity of ideas generated, student self-efficacy, as well as student feedback. These methods include Directed, Case Study, the use of AskNature.org, BioTRIZ, and Functional Modeling. We show that each of the methods produces numerous effective and creative solutions, with a high quality and quantity of ideas. We also show that the methods utilized to teach bioinspired design methods positively affect the students’ design confidence, outcome expectancy and anxiety, while also preserving students’ high motivation towards engineering design. Finally, we identify potential areas for improvement for the methods and the course.Copyright

In Search of Effective Design Problems for Design Research

Much design theory research seeks to create, evaluate, improve or optimize design methods. Whether that research focuses on design thinking, tools, methods, or education, short design problems are often provided to participants in order to evaluate the effects of the variables being tested. When designing and creating such problems, certain characteristics may influence design outcomes: experience and exposure to the design problems vary between participants, and each problem may be more or less favorable to the controlled variable.In this paper we conjecture a small set of design problem characteristics that may influence experimental outcomes, and we discuss two experiments targeted at uncovering this influence. In our first experiment we examine differences in evaluation metrics between two design problems. In a follow up experiment we correlate the hypothesized characteristics to the variances in experiment outcome. These early results assist to further compare and contrast the empirical differences in common evaluation metrics, as well as show how familiarity and extent of the subjects’ knowledge of a design problem influence these metrics. We also expose the potential for interaction between the design method and the design problem.Copyright

Identifying Product Scaling Principles: A Step Towards Enhancing Biomimetic Design

Designers are often faced with the problem of taking a solution at one scale and mapping it to another, often occurring with design-by-analogy and bioinspired design. Despite various scaling laws for specific systems, scaling a solution is a difficult process since different physical principles are often used (causing scaling laws to be invalid) and numerous other changes must be made. This is one of the likely reasons that bioinspired design is difficult. An empirical product study method was used to determine five scaling principles by studying numerous example products. As an initial validation, a design case study applied these principles to a single passenger, low-cost, golf transportation system. Few solutions exist for a single passenger golf transportation system due to difficulties in meeting the customer’s needs, including a portable design which fits in an average sized car trunk at an affordable price. Utilizing the golf bag push cart, full-size two passenger golf cart and scaling principles, a solution was established that fulfilled the design problem. By performing this case study, the general scaling principles are confirmed as a viable aid in product design scaling. This study provides an initial step in creating new innovative designs based on existing solutions in nature or other products that occur at very different scales. Much further work is needed by studying additional products and bioinspired examples. The design principles also need to be more robustly validated.© 2011 ASME

A Comparison of Mechanical Engineering and Biology Students’ Ideation and Bioinspired Design Abilities

Bioinspired design uses nature as a source of inspiration for creating solutions to engineering design problems. Nature evolves time-tested, efficient designs that may offer an innovative solution. However, it appears that one of the main obstacles to bioinspired design is the engineers’ lack of biological knowledge, which causes difficulty in identifying analogous natural systems for the design problems. In this paper, we compare the ability of senior engineering and biology undergraduates to use nature as inspiration for concept generation. The two groups’ solutions were analyzed for quantity of non-redundant ideas, quality, novelty, and variety of the solutions. The initial results indicate that there is not a statistically significant difference between the two groups. General trends are examined, and a qualitative study of the results is presented. The overall results suggest that biology coursework does not significantly aid students in identifying analogous biological systems or developing more creative solutions.

Development of a Search Tool to Identify Structural Design Principles for Bioinspired Materials Design

Natural materials are often more efficient and tend to have a wider range and combination of properties than do present-day engineered materials. Biological materials are composed from a limited set of components, but are able to achieve great diversity in their properties. The variation in properties is largely due to the different arrangements of the materials components, which form unique structures. We believe that there are underlying structural design principles, relating material structure to material properties, that commonly appear in biological materials. Because nature itself achieves highly effective design solutions, the utilization of these natural design principles could similarly improve the effectiveness of engineered materials. Materials scientists need a way to abstract relevant structural design principles from the myriad of biological materials articles for the development of bioinspired materials.This research involves the development of a data mining tool that will quickly identify potential structural design principles of biological materials with respect to a chosen material property or combination of properties. This paper presents the first stage of this process: information retrieval. An algorithm is developed to extract structural design principles’ key terms and relevant passages for specified material properties from a corpus of materials journal articles. The development of this search tool is explained beginning with the determination of search term categories and appropriate search terms and continuing to the refinement of the program algorithm. An evaluation of the tool is also described comparing the program’s results to those of a manual search for the structure-property relationships. The program identified 98% of the manually found structural design principle key terms, although many unanticipated passages were returned as well. Finally, the future work needed to improve the program is presented.© 2014 ASME