Taking inspiration from nature to solve design problems has the potential to lead to major advances in almost every conceivable sphere of design and innovation. Thus, there is a growing global movement of designers interested in the practice of biologically inspired design (BID). However, the adoption and growth of the movement is limited by the fact that most designers are novices in biology. This causes two major issues: (i) slow, tedious search for biological analogues relevant to design problems, and (ii) slow, inaccurate and imprecise understanding of biological systems. Thus, there is a need for (a) information systems that provide access to biological knowledge from a design perspective, and (b) interactive tools that support the process of making biological analogies in conceptual design. Over the last several years, researchers have developed a suite of tools centered around an approach to semantically representing, indexing, retrieving, assessing, and delivering biological information relevant to design problems. This approach can form the basis for providing a range of information services to BID professionals and contribute to the growth of the movement.
BID not only offers innovative solutions, but it can also help drive trends in sustainable design. Since nature does not take the "heat, beat, and treat" approach often taken by human produced technologies, innovation that mimics biological systems fosters sustainable design. Thus, in the long term, researchers believe that this project can help lead to measurable progress in sustainable design. The practice of BID is becoming widespread, encompassing emerging disciplines like biotechnology, robotics, nanotechnology, synthetic biology, etc. Thus, researchers expect that these information services can potentially accelerate the growth of emerging technologies in all these disciplines.
Biologically inspired design is a new movement in design that espouses the use of analogy to natural systems to design technological systems. The movement is pulled by the desire for innovative designs and the need for environmental sustainable development; it is pushed by rapid advances in our understanding of natural systems. While the movement of biologically inspired design is widespread and growing, its practive remains ad hoc. Thus, for the last several years we have been developing an interactive information service to help make biologically inspired design more repeatable and scalable. In particular, supported in part by NSF, we have developed a collaborative technology for semantically annotating biology articles so that a designer can retrieve biology articles from the web that are relevant to his or her design problem. The goal of this project was to assess the feasibility of spawning a startup company to commercialize the above semantic technology. Thus, we learned about the process of spawning startup companies, conducted extensive customer discovery for our technology, and prepared and critiqued several iterations of the business model canvass. Our assessment at the end was that while there is a growing awarness in industry and business about the potential of biologically inspired design, the market is not yet quite ripe for an information service for supporting its practice. This project has significantly influenced our ongoing research. As a direct result of the customer discovery in the project, we are now focusing our research on (i) developing an interactive design environment for supporting end-to-end biologically inspired conceptual design, and (ii) scaling up our semantic technology within the context of the interactive design environment. We fully plan to soon return to the goal of starting a company to commercialize our new technology. We expect that the lessons we learned as part of this project will be critical to our success in the enterprise.
