ABSTRACT Over the last few decades, much research has been conducted to systematically support the facets of the product and process in biologically inspired design (BID). No research identifies or articulates the influential types of knowledge used in the ideation and realization of BID solutions. The objective is to identify the influential types of knowledge (process, product, or combination) in the ideation and realization of BID solutions. Data from a project to develop and demonstrate prototypes of a mobility system of lunar vehicles are used. The design team undertakes a systematic process involving requirements identification, idea generation, concept development, evaluation and selection, prototype development, and testing. The team uses support comprising a systematic framework for designing and Idea-Inspire, which provides process-knowledge and product-knowledge, respectively, to generate ideas for the identified requirements. Twenty concepts are created from these ideas, and two concepts are selected for prototyping. The types of knowledge used: to generate ideas, to generate ideas used in concepts, and to generate ideas used in prototypes, which are chosen from the concepts, are identified, to assess the types of knowledge used in ideation and realization of solutions in BID. The significant findings are as follows: (a) most ideas are generated when Idea-Inspire and the framework are used together and (b) most ideas generated with Idea-Inspire and the framework are used in the 20 concepts created from the pool of ideas and the 2 concepts selected for prototyping. This shows the significance of using process- and product-knowledge together in ideation and realization.
Srinivasan et al. (Thu,) studied this question.