Bioinspired Design: Creativity and Sustainability

Biomimetics aims to inspire creative design that helps conscious abstraction of new principles and ideas using nature as inspiration. It is important to understand the conditions that allow such an approach to produce a bioinspired design that transforms ideas from nature to engineering. The development of smart materials laid down the foundation that facilitates the development of new biomimetic based technology and systems, such as, bioinspired robots, sensors, materials, etc. However, the developments of bioinspired intelligent creatures and are hampered by technological constraints that continue to be a challenge. Designing new robots and intelligent machines that can move and perform their assign tasks using creative bioinspired design ideas and technology such as artificial muscles envision new realities with great potentials. This paper sets out the concept as an engineering design methodology and its evolution importance as an interdisciplinary field of study. Also, it introduces nature as a principle source of inspiration to design for creativity and highlights the best design methodologies and practices that leads to consistent and inherently sustainable design. Furthermore, it discusses some of the requirements to integrate effective design with sustainability, develop new and creative ideas and highlight the directions of research activities in the field. The paper also underlines the needs and the challenges facing the progress in this field.