Professional Documents
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You are probably wondering what I have been doing for the past four months.
And Id better be doing something productive, otherwise I have no excuse for
relinquishing my mania for writing. Well, Ive been reading. A lot. And designing.
A lot. I will do another entry on the latter, because I cant wait to share the
former: all the books and articles I have found extremely useful in my
biologically inspired design endeavours. Why, you ask?
Because there is such concept as comfort reading when you dont want to read
anything challenging or too full of ideas. Well, my list is the opposite of that. Its
the kind of literature that energizes, excites, makes you highly uncomfortable,
causes you to down a bottle Nyquil at night just to fall asleep, and continuously
generates opposing ideas in your mind. And you will never look at comfort
reading again. If youd like to give uncomfortable reading a try, proceed further.
As a side note, I am omitting my reviews of books by Janine Benyus, Joseph BarCohen,Michael Braungart and William McDonough and would like to focus on the
lesser known literature. Chances are, if you are reading this list, you are deep
into biomimicry, biomimetics, and nature inspired design already.
Grassi, W., and M. Collins. Leonardo da Vinci. In Nature and Design, edited
by M. Collins, M. A. Atherton and J. A. Bryant. London: WIT Press.
This article must be introduced within the context of the book series that rests
on the parallels between human design and nature. Collins (as the main editor
of the series) considers biology and engineering as disciplines that could have
an advantageous dialogue.
Leonardo da Vinci, according to Grassi and Collins, is a personification of duality
between the detached nature of a scientist and the mind-set of technologist.
The authors present a systematic analysis of Leonardos life and his broad
polytechnic achievements in the disciplines of art, engineering, and natural
sciences. More importantly, they illustrate Leonardos holistic worldview based
on the universal application of natures laws to machines man
architecture the macrocosm.
science and technology are increasingly hitting the limits of approaches based
on traditional disciplines, and biology may serve as an untapped resource for
design methodology, with concept testing having occurred over millions of years
of evolution.
Wilson and Rosen introduce the principle of local and distant analogies as tools
for idea generation, asserting the advantage of innovative component in the
former. They also cite other literature where the number of distant analogies
used in the design process, was positively correlated with the novelty of the
resulting design. The concept sets the stage for a study conducted with
mechanical engineers in evaluating the hypothesis of novelty and variety of
designs following the presentation of examples from the world of biology. The
authors proceed to prove the alternative hypothesis through qualitative research
with results indicating the existing correlation.
The article is a good resource of research methodology in the field of biologically
inspired design.