BioInspired! So What? Now What!

The BID Community is at a crossroads.  In hindsight, the original concept of creating a "space" where current and aspiring practitioners, facilitators and people knowledge about the human condition could share ideas appears to have been premature.  We have had little success in reaching out to the broader community and BID Community activity has been steadily declining.  It is not clear that we even meet the criteria of a community.  Although the Internet allows us to 'meet' virtually, the energy generated through face-to-face discussions seems to dissipate quickly when we return to our 'day jobs'.  We share an interest in the concepts of biomimicry, biomimetics and bio-inspired design (B3D for short) but adopt a diverse set of approaches in applying these concepts.  This is in itself not an issue but makes it challenging to identify common attitudes, interests and goals.

The BBC article Nature's spring: Cod bounce back by Richard Black describes the collapse of Atlantic cod stocks that led to the 1993 fishing moratorium.  Unfortunately, the ban on fishing did not result in the expected recovery, for reasons that have been hotly debated.  The recently published paper Transient dynamics of an altered large marine ecosystem suggests that predatory species such as cod, haddock and saithe (pollock) may be making a comeback due to a complex series of interactions and feedback loops.

2012/01/21 corrected links to Vincent and Rosen video

Through the efforts of Ashok Goel (Georgia Tech), Dan McAdams (Texas A&M) and Rob Stone (Oregon State), the first NSF-funded Bio-Inspired Design Workshop was held in Palo Alto on March 20, 2011.   The theme was Charting a Course for Computer-Aided Bio-Inspired Design Research, bringing together 34 members of the bio-inspired design research community to explore how we can "systematically mine biological knowledge to solve existing engineering problems".