Applying Designer Feedback to Generate Requirements for an Intuitive Biologically Inspired Design Tool

This research provides a comparison of a set of Bio-Inspired Design (BID) tools to determine advantages and disadvantages of each, with particular focus on database-directed design processes. The result of this comparison is a set of beneficial attributes, discussed to develop requirements for formulating an effective BID tool. In this study, each tool is evaluated in terms of both the effectiveness of the concept generation process, and designer feedback concerning the effective elements. The comparison between tools uses concept sketches and feedback generated from a classroom of graduate and undergraduate engineering students. Over the course of a ten-week class, each BID technique was formally presented to the students. Following this presentation, students were given a new design problem and instructed to use the new BID technique to generate a set of solution concepts. Quantity of concepts generated was used to assess the goodness of each concept generation activity outcome, which forms one basis for comparing the different tools. In addition, questionnaires were used to assess and identify the various positive and negative elements of each BID tool.