Design Patterns and Cross-Domain Analogies in Biologically Inspired Sustainable Design

Abstract

Sustainable design is as an important movement in design. Biologically inspired design is a major paradigm for sustainable design. In this paper, we analyze a corpus of biologically inspired design projects in terms of sustainability. We then describe a case study of analogical design of a fog harvesting net, and abstract from it the patterns of Hydrophobia and Hydrophilia. We indicate how these two function-mechanism design patterns occur in several design projects in our corpus. This analysis indicates how biologically inspired sustainable design can be analyzed in terms of cross-domain analogical transfer of design patterns.