BioInspired! So What? Now What!

... the Journal of Mechanical Design calls for submissions for a special issue on Biologically-Inspired Design.  Topics can include, but are not limited to the following:

• BID system usability, interface design, visualization, and search;
• Identification of the role of BID tools and design methods for each stage of design process, e.g., problem framing, conceptual design, refinement, production (DfM for BID), marketing, re-use/recycle;
• Knowledge-base/data-base building and integration, ontologies (construction, use and evaluation) and testbeds (computational and physical);
• Evaluation of analogy utility (before, after and during use) during BID use, and manufacturability of resulting designs;
• Roles of scales (both spatial – from micro to macro to systems of systems – and temporal – to promote desired emergent behavior over time) of biological knowledge for problem identification, design decomposition, generation, evaluation and explanation;
• Impact of BID on communication in multiple disciplinary teams, e.g., novice-expert studies, development of a community of practice and networks, sociology of disciplinary norms;
• Teaching approaches and curricular development.

The special issue also welcomes papers that closely examine the theoretical foundations of the various existing approaches and their relative merits. While application areas are not limited to a specific domain of interest, we encourage submissions that have much potential to solve urgent and complex challenges faced by persons and planet such as those found in military, urban infrastructures, climate change, sustainability and space exploration domains. Although the inclusion of a design case study is not mandatory, the design context under which the methods can be used needs to be clearly stated in all submissions — relevance to engineering design will be explicitly considered as a criterion in the review process.

Publication Target Dates

Authors submit papers by: January 15, 2014
Initial review completed by: March 15, 2014
Publication of special issue by: November 2014