I-Corps: Knowledge Access for Design Ideation in Bioinspired Invention

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Over the last generation, bioinspiration has transformed into an important, widespread and growing design movement with applications in fields as varied as building, energy, water, transportation, communication, food systems, health technology, manufacturing, and consumer products. Bioinspiration views nature as a vast library of robust, efficient, multifunctional and sustainable designs, and espouses the use of biological systems as sources of inspiration as well as standards of evaluation for designing technological systems. Over the last generation, bioinspiration has transformed into an important, widespread and growing design movement.Bioinspiration is expected to have a global economic value of $1.6 trillion - $2.1 trillion by 2030. The adoption and growth of the bioinspiration movement is limited by the fact that most designers are novices in biology. This causes two major 'pains': slow, tedious, frustrating search for biological analogues relevant to a design problem, and slow, inaccurate and imprecise understanding of biological systems. Thus there is a need for information systems that provide access to biological knowledge from a design perspective, and interactive tools that support the process of making biological analogies in conceptual design. In this project, the I-Corps team will investigate the commercial viability of interactive technologies for supporting design ideation in bioinspired invention that has been developed. A successful commercial enterprise in knowledge access for design ideation in bioinspired invention has the potential for a transformative impact on the business of bioinspiration.