Permaculture and TRIZ – Methodologies for Cross-Pollination between Biology and Engineering

AbstractTheory of Inventive Problem Solving (TRIZ) was developed due to analysis and mostly for dealing with artificial engineering systems in 1950th of the twentieth century. Permaculture was developed as a method of engineering of artificial natural living systems in 1970th of last century. Permaculture (which is portmanteau word – PERMAnent + agriCULTURE) is ecologically balanced agriculture or ecological engineering and architecture of artificial super- productive ecosystem, which requires minimum of human interference and create minimum of negative environmental impact. Permaculture designs living eco-systems like engineers design and operate machines made of inanimate materials. Both methodologies were developed independently, but have a lot in common. In our paper we are going to compare these methodologies and show the points of mutual enrichment. We argue that both processes of knowledge transfer “from biology into engineering” and “from engineering to biology” can be done via TRIZ – Theory of Inventive Problem Solving

Biomimetics: its practice and theory

Biomimetics, a name coined by Otto Schmitt in the 1950s for the transfer of ideas and analogues from biology to technology, has produced some significant and successful devices and concepts in the past 50 years, but is still empirical. We show that TRIZ, the Russian system of problem solving, can be adapted to illuminate and manipulate this process of transfer. Analysis using TRIZ shows that there is only 12% similarity between biology and technology in the principles which solutions to problems illustrate, and while technology solves problems largely by manipulating usage of energy, biology uses information and structure, two factors largely ignored by technology