A functional representation for aiding biomimetic and artificial inspiration of new ideas

Inspiration is useful for exploration and discovery of new solutionspaces. Systems in natural and artificial worlds and theirfunctionality are seen as rich sources of inspiration for ideageneration. However, unlike in the artificial domain where existingsystems are often used for inspiration, those from the natural domainare rarely used in a systematic way for this purpose. Analogy is longregarded as a powerful means for inspiring novel idea generation. Oneaim of the work reported here is to initiate similar work in the areaof systematic biomimetics for product development, so that inspirationfrom both natural and artificial worlds can be used systematically tohelp develop novel, analogical ideas for solving design problems. Ageneric model for representing causality of natural and artificialsystems has been developed, and used to structure information in adatabase of systems from both the domains. These are implemented in apiece of software for automated analogical search of relevant ideasfrom the databases to solve a given problem. Preliminary experiments atvalidating the software indicate substantial potential for the approach