The Art and Science of Biomimicry : Abstracting Design Principles from Nature

Biomimicry is an emerging discipline that seeks nature’s advice and brings diverse stakeholders together to create designs that emulate the way nature functions, not just the way it looks. The field itself is a multidisciplinary endeavor, yet biomimicry educators frequently work alone. Pedagogical methods based on trial and error may waste precious time. In this study, a set of four biomimicry experts from diverse disciplines and different areas around the globe collaborated to compare pedagogy and analyze student work to illuminate best principles for teaching students to translate biology into design solutions, a key step in the biomimicry design process. A total of 313 assignments created by 179 different students were evaluated. The results showed that the inclusion of art in the learning of science, namely the hand drawing of the biological mechanism can lead to higher quality of abstracted design principles. Stevens, L., Bidwell, D., Fehler, M., Singhal, A. (2022). The Art and Science of Biomimicry—Abstracting Design Principles from Nature. In: Rezaei, N. (eds) Transdisciplinarity. Integrated Science, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi-org.ezproxy.hhs.nl/10.1007/978-3-030-94651-7_29