SUMMARY
In Conceptual Design, the designer is tasked with searching for new and innovative design solutions. This search process, referred to as the designer’s design space, has been shown to dictate the quality and effectiveness of the final design solution. According to the theory of bounded rationality, this design space is bounded by the limited cognitive abilities of the designer. To overcome the limitations imposed by bounded rationality, designers often employ several techniques to aid in idea generation, including building upon analogous solutions in the current domain of application. However, designers commonly fail to take to advantage of solutions and practices of other sciences and technologies and/or fail to even recognize the similarities between their technical problems and solutions to similar problems from otherwise alien domains. To address this problem, the following research question is proposed, How can we aid the designer in more effective ideation in Conceptual Design?” In this research, biological strategies are used to aid the designer in Conceptual Design. Through millions of years of research and development, nature has developed efficient and economical solutions to the problems it faces. It is believed that harnessing design strategies from nature will lead to more effective solutions to the engineering problems currently faced by designers. Specifically, the primary hypothesis of this research is as follows: “Building upon a rich behavioral model of biological systems and a strategy repository, the proposed approaches to Bio-inspired Conceptual Design can be used to aid the designer in (1) identifying relevant biological systems and (2) using biological strategies in Conceptual Design to produce 2a) a larger variety of design ideas (2b) design ideas of greater novelty and (2c) higher quality design ideas”. The fundamental claims of this hypothesis include that of biological system representation, behavioral decomposition, efficient retrieval, and assessing the impact of biological strategies on Conceptual Design.