2023 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

Engineering designs inspired by the natural world are often highly innovative, offering novel solutions to human problems where engineers had initially only seen trade-offs. Unlocking the full potential of biological-inspired engineering design can be difficult due to the need for knowledge transfer between biology and engineering. As a result, most bio-inspired designs have been the result of either chance observation or dedicated studies. Efforts have been made to develop normative bio-inspired design processes and identify approaches that can aid non-biology experts to find and implement bio-inspired strategies, however true accessibility is still lacking. Understanding connections between how biological information is represented (e.g., figures, terminology specialization, and age-based reading levels) versus the ability of an engineer (and especially a student) to produce successful bio-inspired designs is critical. This paper reviews a preliminary classroom study that sought to understand 1) how the source of biological information impacts resultant ideation success, 2) how the form of the biological representation influences resultant solutions, and 3) what the critical characteristics of a biological inspiration’s representation are for it to be successfully transformed into an engineering idea. The long term goal is to understand critical characteristics needed for successful knowledge transfer from non-engineering disciplines to create methods that broaden the prevalence of bio-inspired and other interdisciplinary designs.