Atlanta, GA – January 5, 2025

We started the year off with our lab’s work being presented at the Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology (SICB, https://sicb.org/) 2025 conference, thanks to an invitation from Drs. Cassandra Donatelli and Karly Cohen to participate in their special session “From evolution to innovation: bridging biology and engineering through bioinspired design.” The presentation, and upcoming paper with PhD student Hadear Hassan, focused on how to better support engineers seeking to do bio-inspired design: “The Role of Information Representation in Fostering Bio-Inspired Designs in Engineering.” The presentation will be published as a paper in the ICB journal later this year.

Abstract: Engineering designs inspired by the natural world encompass many innovative and novel solutions to human problems, often solving problems where engineers had initially only seen trade-offs. Most bio-inspired engineering designs however have been the result of either chance observation or dedicated study, hindering efforts to have biological inspiration become a mainstream tool. Efforts have been made to develop normative bio-inspired processes and identify approaches that can aid the non-experts in biology find and successfully implement a bioinspired strategy, however true accessibility is still lacking. This work uses classroom studies to understand the impact of information representation on engineering design creativity under a biologically inspired engineering umbrella. Small teams of students were provided with a common problem description, followed by different sets of biological information. This biological information was made up of various technical levels of figures, discipline-specific terminology, and reading levels. The students were tasked with generating bio-inspired design solutions using the provided biological information. Sketches and feedbacks from students provide insight into a possible connection between information representation (text vs. images, reading level, disciplinary overlap, ideation novelty and diversity scores) and bio-inspired engineering designs. Using images and different levels of technical complexity in the text are possible routes for improving successful interdisciplinary knowledge transfer in ways that broaden the accessibility of problem driven interdisciplinary design.