Tools to Incorporate Biomimetic into Product Design- A Review

This paper reviewed available biomimetic tools which are being utilized to enhance and aid the design of products.  So far, tools that have been used to gain insight of biomimetic products include DANE databases and IDEA-INSPIRE, Natural Language analysis tool and Asknature.org website. This review focused on the representations, characteristics and biomimetic information retrieval process of each search tools studied by previous researchers. Finally, the conclusions and important summaries were presented accordingly in the form of a table. Based on the findings, there are still problems and challenges regarding the applications of each tool in the bio-inspired design process. Some suggestions have been made to further improve the conditions

A preliminary research to identify the biomimetic entities for generating novel wave energy converters

Biomimetics and creatures could contribute to novel design inspirations for wave energy converter as to other engineering branches since we have seen numerous examples in engineering applications. But how to obtain valuable biological entities or bionic design cases that could produce inspirations for novel designs may be challenging for the designers of wave energy converters (WECs). This research work carries out a preliminary research on acquiring the biological entities for designers, so to obtain the innovative bio-inspired ideas for designing novel WECs. In the proposed method, the first step is to draw out the engineering terminologies based on the functions, structures and energy extraction principles of existing WECs. Then by applying ‘WordNet’, the candidate biological terminologies can be obtained. Next, using ‘AskNature’ and through manual selection and filtering, the biological terminologies can be acquired. Lastly, to use the biological terminologies to establish the reference biological entities and the information and knowledge so for designing an innovative WEC. Using the proposed methodology, a novel WEC was conceived and verified

Surveying trends in analogy-inspired product innovation

Analogies play a well-noted role in innovative design. Analogical reasoning is central to the practices of design-by-analogy and bio-inspired design. In both, analogies are used to derive abstracted principles from prior examples to generate new design solutions. While numerous laboratory and classroom studies of analogy usage have been published, relatively few studies have systematically examined real-world design-by-analogy to describe its characteristics and impacts. To better teach design-by-analogy and develop support tools for engineers, specific insights are needed regarding, for example, what types of product advantages are gained through design-by-analogy and how different design process characteristics influence its outcomes. This research comprises two empirical product studies which investigate analogical inspiration in real-world design to inform the development of new analogy methods and tools. The first, an exploratory pilot study of 57 analogy-inspired products, introduces the product study method and applies several categorical variables to classify product examples. These variables measure aspects such as the composition of the design team, the driving approach to analogical reasoning, and the achieved benefits of using the analogy-inspired concept. The full scale study of 70 analogy-inspired products uses formal collection and screening methods and a refined set of classification variables to analyze examples. It adopts a cross-sectional approach, using statistical tests of association to detect relationships among variables. Combined, these surveys of real-world analogy-inspired innovation inform the development of analogy tools and provide a general account of distant analogy usage across engineering disciplines. The cross-sectional product study method demonstrated in this work introduces a valuable tool for investigating factors and impacts of real-world analogy usage in design.M.S

Understanding Designer Mental Models to Support Computer Directed Analogical Design

Analysis of alternative concepts has a significant impact on design project outcomes, and yet many design teams fail to consider a significantly broad range of conceptual solutions. Within the realm of conceptual design exists a technique called design by analogy (DBA) -- the practice of reapplying old solutions to new problems. DBA mitigates the effort required to generate a large field of candidate concepts by leveraging existing knowledge from a wide variety of domains, making it an attractive approach toward improving design outcomes. Unfortunately, DBA is challenging in the absence of expert knowledge. Designers need computational support in order to effectively identify a large number of high-quality analogical connections across a wide variety of domains. With this challenge in mind, the goal of this dissertation is to improve the body of knowledge regarding computational support for design by analogy. More specifically, this body of work includes five manuscripts. Manuscript 0 presents a review of several function-related design abstractions, including their impacts on education and industry. Manuscript 1 studies analogy retrieval in a novel design context and catalogs the types of abstract similarity (including function) commonly used to form analogies. Manuscript 2 examines a scalable approach to capturing analogy-relevant design knowledge to support large-scale analogy searching. Manuscripts 3 and 4 examine and modify a technique from de novo drug design for quickly indexing and retrieving design analogies. Manuscript 3 examines the domain independence of the technique, and manuscript 4 develops it as a large-scale design analogy search method. The body of work contributes to a greater understanding of (1) the abstractions used by designers during conceptual design, (2) the use of human computation to support conceptual design activities, and (3) large scale solution screening using a variety of mixed design abstractions. This understanding advances the creation of tools that enable designers to consider a wide range of conceptual solutions in spite of lacking domain expertise