A functional representation for aiding biomimetic and artificial inspiration of new ideas

TLDR

Inspiration from natural and artificial systems is a powerful means for discovering new solutions, yet systematic use of natural systems for analogical idea generation remains rare. The study aims to establish systematic biomimetic methods for product development, enabling the use of natural and artificial systems to generate novel analogical design ideas. The authors built a generic causal model of natural and artificial systems, organized these into databases, and implemented software that automatically searches for analogical ideas to solve design problems. Preliminary experiments demonstrate substantial potential for the automated analogical search approach.

Abstract

Inspiration is useful for exploration and discovery of new solution spaces. Systems in natural and artificial worlds and their functionality are seen as rich sources of inspiration for idea generation. However, unlike in the artificial domain where existing systems are often used for inspiration, those from the natural domain are rarely used in a systematic way for this purpose. Analogy is long regarded as a powerful means for inspiring novel idea generation. One aim of the work reported here is to initiate similar work in the area of systematic biomimetics for product development, so that inspiration from both natural and artificial worlds can be used systematically to help develop novel, analogical ideas for solving design problems. A generic model for representing causality of natural and artificial systems has been developed, and used to structure information in a database of systems from both the domains. These are implemented in a piece of software for automated analogical search of relevant ideas from the databases to solve a given problem. Preliminary experiments at validating the software indicate substantial potential for the approach.