Publication
Effects of Abstraction on Selecting Relevant Biological Phenomena for Biomimetic Design
AbstractThe natural-language approach to identifying biological analogies exploits the existing format of much biological knowledge, beyond databases created for biomimetic design. However, designers may need to select analogies from search results, during which biases may exist toward: specific words in descriptions of biological phenomena, familiar organisms and scales, and strategies that match preconceived solutions. Therefore, we conducted two experiments to study the effect of abstraction on overcoming these biases and selecting biological phenomena based on analogical similarities. Abstraction in our experiments involved replacing biological nouns with hypernyms. The first experiment asked novice designers to choose between a phenomenon suggesting a highly useful strategy for solving a given problem, and another suggesting a less-useful strategy, but featuring bias elements. The second experiment asked novice designers to evaluate the relevance of two biological phenomena that suggest similarly useful strategies to solve a given problem. Neither experiment demonstrated the anticipated benefits of abstraction. Instead, our abstraction led to: (1) participants associating nonabstracted words to design problems and (2) increased difficulty in understanding descriptions of biological phenomena. We recommend investigating other ways to implement abstraction when developing similar tools or techniques that aim to support biomimetic design.PDF
Related Resources
See what’s new.
2012
A BioBrick Compatible Strategy for Genetic Modification of Plants.Plant biotechnology can be leveraged to produce food, fuel, medicine,…
2013
Development of Discrete Event System Specification (DEVS) Building Performance Models for Building Energy DesignThe discrete event system specification (DEVS) is a formalism for…
2014
Towards Visualization of Simulated Occupants and their Interactions with Buildings at Multiple Time ScalesWhile most building simulation tools model occupancy using simple…
2023
New Research Brings Beam Structures to Generative DesignUsing a new form of generative design to create easy-to-fabricate…
Get in touch
Something pique your interest? Get in touch if you’d like to learn more about Autodesk Research, our projects, people, and potential collaboration opportunities.
Contact us