2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This work details a customized, Artificial Intelligence (AI) assisted method and digital tool to create bio-inspired mind maps for enhancing ideation in the engineering design process. Using biological examples as inspiration for innovation, sometimes referred to as biomimicry, in the design ideation process is well-documented and has been prolific. One problem with implementing biomimetic approaches is that knowledge of the vast biological realm can be elusive for engineering teams. Often, an engineering design team does not have specific knowledge of diverse biological domains such as cellular biology, animal biology, and plant biology. Therefore, finding the “best”, or even relevant, biological examples to inspire ideation for a specific design problem is challenging. AI can assist in finding appropriate biological analogies across these different domains by leveraging large language models trained on extensive text corpora encompassing biological, scientific, and engineering content. Our work introduces a custom AI-driven process to generate biological examples to populate the mind maps. Mind maps are a proven method for structuring and organizing design ideation. Mind maps visually show the relationships between different ideas by having the main design challenge in the center of the mind map and then identifying categories and subcategories of potential solutions. Functional decomposition of a design problem is used as the input to the AI-assisted method, where the functions define the hierarchical categories and subcategories of the mind map. This approach ensures that the AI-generated biological analogies are directly tailored to the specific design challenge. The method has been assessed, but the assessment is ongoing. The initial assessment has shown that the AI-assisted method is effective and well received by the designers. Overall, this work demonstrates that integrating AI-assisted biological analogy generation into mind maps, using input from functional decomposition, can enhance bio-inspired ideation in engineering design.