Including Functional Models of Biological Phenomena as Design Stimuli

Abstract

This work explores the representation of biological phenomena as stimuli to designers for biomimetic design. We describe a study where participants were asked to solve a micro-assembly problem given a set of biological representations of leaf abscission for inspiration. The visual aids presented to the designers are investigated, and the use of functional models of biological phenomena in particular is critiqued. The designs resulting from the study are classified and theories drawn as to possible influences of the biological representations. Observations, retrospective conversations with participants, and analogical reasoning classifications are used to determine positive qualities as well as areas for improvement in representation of the biological domain. Findings suggest that designers need an explicit list of all possible inherent biological strategies, previously extracted using function structures with objective graph grammar rules. Challenges specific to this type of study are discussed, and possible improvement of representative aids are outlined.

Modeling design objects in CAD system for Service/Product Engineering

“…As Brown and Blessing [44] conclude in their paper, affordance-based design is a useful complement to function-based design when dealing with "possible actions" by the users. The mindset of affordance-based design is an interesting follow-up, along with other design theories deriving from other fields (another instance of such research is seen in [45]) and will be considered in order to obtain as satisfying a service CAD system as possible. The modular design of Service Explorer makes this future development possible.…”

Bio-inspired design: the impact of collaboration between engineers and biologists on analogical transfer and ideation

“…In addition, the resulting bio-inspired solution is, in most cases, not the same as the existing biological solution. Based on this finding, researchers have developed analogy categories to differentiate between various abstraction and difference levels: Mak and Shu (2004b) and Vakili et al (2007) use four categories to evaluate the accuracy of bio-inspired physical effects and working principles ("strategies"): Unrelated strategies have no link to the biological system. Incorrect strategies are inspired by the biological system, but the designers misinterpret the biological strategy.…”

“…Incorrect strategies are inspired by the biological system, but the designers misinterpret the biological strategy. Incomplete strategies adopt a "general principle" of the biological strategy, but they do not apply the concrete strategy (Vakili et al 2007). Correct strategies use "similar elements" as the biological strategy (Mak and Shu 2004b).…”

“…The three definitions explained in Sect. 2.1 are used to analyse the analogy category of the bio-inspired solution ideas: accuracy (Mak and Shu 2004b;Vakili et al 2007), similarity (Mak and Shu 2004a), and elements of transfer (Sartori et al 2010). Table 2 shows the interpretation of these variables in this work.…”

DTM at 25: Essays on Themes and Future Directions

“…The variety of functional reasoning approaches (see [111, 112, e.g.] for a summary), the areas within which they are explored (e.g., in product or system architecture by Stone [44], in biologically inspired design [105,113,114,115], in computational synthesis [116,117,118,119,120,121], in design by analogy and analogical reasoning [122,123,96,124,125], and in efficient sharing and search [126,127,128]) are testimony to the prolific research in the area of function. A summary of functional representation approaches can be found in two special issues of AIEDAM [129,130,131], and a summary of major approaches within the other two tasks can be found in [111,132,112].…”