BioInspired! So What? Now What!

In this NSF sponsored second workshop on bio-inspired design, the organizers will summarize the results from the first workshop (held on 20-March-2011 in Palo Alto, CA), engage participants in short design concept generation with current BID approaches and, based on the first two activities, identify future directions for BID research.

The key motivation for the workshop lies in identifying future research directions of BID – specifically problem focused research directions such as complex system design and sustainability. Another key motivation is the identification of the fundamental impediments to joining the engineering and biological (and related) disciplines and the associated research directions needed to overcome them. Bringing these two disciplines together is key due to i) the relevant technical knowledge in each community and ii) the cultural difference between them that has occurred through the development of engineering as a solution generating applied science and biology as a knowledge generating pure science.

Bio-inspired design (BID) or biomimicry is an emerging research area in engineering design, computer science and biology that seeks to systematically mine biological knowledge to solve existing engineering problems.  However, the community of BID researchers at present is fragmented with no professional society, unifying funding source, or recurring conference meeting.  BID design research is active across many disciplines and has had important and significant results. Nevertheless, BID remains largely a research activity contained in universities, not an activity practiced by design engineers in the field.  The research-not-practice status of BID requires approaches to mine biology for solutions to problems for which we have no current “engineered” solution.  For example, biological solutions exhibit superior sustainability to engineered solution.  Similarly, biological solutions are complex both in their solution and the problem they solve.  As the problems solved become more complex, and the engineered solutions themselves also become more complex, perhaps biology offers insight on how to solve the problem.