Together with colleagues from the Technical University of Denmark, I have been involved in writing a review paper on the methods of biologically inspired design (BID) paradigms including problem-driven BID and solution-driven BID. The paper provides a wealth of examples as well as an overview of publication rate and patents in the fields of biomimetics and biomimicry. The paper was recently delivered by the first author Dr Torben Lenau at the SPIE 2018 conference on Smart Structures and Materials and published in the conference proceedings.
Biologically inspired design is attracting increasing interest since it offers access to a huge biological repository of well proven design principles that can be used for developing new and innovative products. Biological phenomena can inspire product innovation in as diverse areas as mechanical engineering, medical engineering, nanotechnology, photonics, environmental protection and agriculture. However, a major obstacle for the wider use of biologically inspired design is the knowledge barrier that exist between the application engineers that have insight into how to design suitable products and the biologists with detailed knowledge and experience in understanding how biological organisms function in their environment. The biologically inspired design process can therefore be approached using different design paradigms depending on the dominant opportunities, challenges and knowledge characteristics. Design paradigms are typically characterized as either problem-driven, solution-driven, sustainability driven, bioreplication or a combination of two or more of them. The design paradigms represent different ways of overcoming the knowledge barrier and the present paper presents a review of their characterization and application.
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