Design problem solving with biological analogies: A verbal protocol study

Abstract

Biomimetic design applies biological analogies to solve design problems and has been known to produce innovative solutions. However, when designers are asked to perform biomimetic design, they often have difficulty recognizing analogies between design problems and biological phenomena. Therefore, this research aims to investigate designer behaviors that either hinder or promote the use of analogies in biomimetic design. A verbal protocol study was conducted on 30 engineering students working in small teams while participating in biomimetic design sessions. A coding scheme was developed to analyze cognitive processes involved in biomimetic design. We observed that teams were less likely to apply overall biological analogies if they tended to recall existing solutions that could be easily associated with specific superficial or functional characteristics of biological phenomena. We also found that the tendency to evaluate ideas, which reflects critical thinking, correlates with the likelihood of identifying overall biological analogies. Insights from this paper may contribute toward developing generalized methods to facilitate biomimetic design.

Bio-Inspired Design: An Overview Investigating Open Questions From the Broader Field of Design-by-Analogy

“…Cheong et al, 2014 [92] 5 main design activities to code BID data: problem discussion/analysis, biological phenomenon discussion/analysis, relating to/recalling existing solutions, generating new solutions, and evaluating solutions/analogies; Design evaluation and critical thinking led to strategy level analogies from biology, as opposed to lower level superficial or function analogies Helms and Goel, 2012 [93] Three key attributes of evolution of design problem; (1) design problem can/may change throughout design process, regardless of success/failure of ideation activities; (2) Existing solutions to design problem affect how it is formulated; (3) value of cross-domain analogy/knowledge transfer not only comes from transferring concepts, but also innovative design problem formulation Weissburg et al, 2010 [94] To teach BID to undergraduate of engineering and biology majors, familiarize students with techniques to help transfer knowledge from biological to engineering domain through lectures on BID practice and examples, analogy exercises, mentorship, and more.…”

Evaluating the impact of Idea-Inspire 4.0 on analogical transfer of concepts

“…The rationale is as follows. Introducing a biological system as a support for an engineering design problem by in itself improves the chances of attaining a novel solution (Sarkar et al , 2008; Cheong et al , 2014), since far-domain (e.g., biology) analogies are more likely to be novel compared with near-domain (e.g., engineering) analogies (Keshwani and Chakrabarti, 2016). However, the main challenge for engineering designers is to understand and utilize biological systems as stimuli.…”

“…Engineering designers use the existing commercial knowledge bases such as Wikipedia, How Stuff Works, Ask Nature that provide marginal explanations of biological systems, which are known for their complexity in structure, function, and behavior (Cheong et al , 2014). In biological systems, several functions occur in sequence or at the same time, also at different system levels (often in different components).…”

Using analogies to explain versus inspire concepts

“…Again, this is problematic when designers are provided a biological analogy for use to solve an engineering problem. In a previous study (Cheong et al, 2014), senior undergraduate engineering students were asked to design a credit card marketing solution using the pheromone release of ants as an analogy. Some students continued to draw parallels between the analogy and problem by stating that the queen ant was analogous to the CEO of the credit card company.…”