8. Supporting Analogical Transfer in Biologically Inspired Design

Biologically inspired design (BID) is an emergent area of research for understanding design with biological mechanisms as inspiration, and for supporting systematic BID for developing creative designs. Understanding and supporting the processes of analogical transfer, whereby potential biological material is identified and adapted to solve engineering problems, is the focus of this chapter. Two questions are asked: At what level does analogical transfer take place? How to support analogical transfer? Our empirical studies show that transfer generally takes place at four levels of abstraction: state change, organ, attribute, and part. When unaided, BID is dominated by transfer at part, attribute, and organ levels, which reduces potential for creativity. This led to development of new guidelines for supporting systematic analogical transfer, an Integrated Framework for designing to encourage transfer at each level of abstraction, and a computational tool called ‘Idea-Inspire’ to provide analogically relevant biological stimuli for inspiration at any of these levels. Comparative studies using these interventions show significant increase in the number of transferred designs when aided by these interventions and a shift in the majority of the transfer to state change and organ levels, thereby increasing the potential for greater creativity.