Proposal of a technical function grammar oriented to biomimetic

Abstract

Knowledge transfer from biologists to engineers is one of the main obstacles to the diffusion of biomimetic. An approach to overcome this obstacle is presented and discussed. This approach is based on a construct to describe high-level engineering functions stored in a relational database together with a species grouping based on a functional classification, the corresponding biological solutions and the ‘official’ taxonomy.\ud Several relationships among the keys allow extracting and organising the stored knowledge both from the engineering and from the biological point of view. An engineer can extract from this database all the biological solutions of a function formulated in the ‘engineer’s language’, and then determine the more suitable solution for his/her specific problem

UNO-BID: unified ontology for causal-function modeling in biologically inspired design

“…, Noun . schema (Pahl et al, 2007), and to some related International Journal of Design Creativity and Innovation 5 evolutions (Rosa et al, 2011). Nevertheless, this way of storing function definition does not seem in contrast with the theoretical definition.…”

“…These reflections comply with the use of Organ to represent the International Journal of Design Creativity and Innovation 7 system structure, as proposed by the authors of the model in Srinivasan, Chakrabarti, and Lindemann (2012). It is also worth noting that the environment is explicitly mentioned, recognizing its fundamental importance in biological phenomena (Rosa et al, 2011;Vattam, Wiltgen, et al, 2010). Analyzing Input definitions, it can be concluded that an Input is a particular property of the environment that triggers the Physical Effect, thus producing the Physical Phenomenon; as such, the Input should be distinguished from the system properties that enable the Physical Effect and are described by the Organ.…”

“…The approach followed by Rosa, Rovida, Viganò, and Razzetti (2011) can also be included in this category. They developed an archive of biological solutions, indexed on a functional basis (i.e., according to the NIST functional basis (Hirtz, Stone, Mcadams, Szykman, & Wood, 2002)).…”

Natural language processing in-and-for design research

“…To effectively search for concepts of biological species, Rosa et al (2011) develop a structured database of these and group these using high-level functions that are represented using <verb, noun, predicate> where the predicate is represented as <preposition, noun>. Vandevenne et al (2015, pp.…”

Conceptualisation and formalisation of technical functions

“…The 'Proposal of a technical function grammar oriented to biomimetic' presented by Rosa et al (2011) aims to remove the barriers that hamper designers in their reasoning with analogies by stimulating and inspiring them with knowledge available in another domain. Towards this end, the authors present an extension of the standard verb and object type of function formulation and show how their conceptualisation is operationalised as a database-driven computer system with interfaces tailored to engineers and biologists, respectively.…”