Benchmarking bio-inspired designs with brainstorming in terms of novelty of design outcomes

With the increasing demand of innovative products in the market, there is a need for effective creativity approaches that will support development of creative design outcomes. Most researchers agree that novelty of design concepts is a major element of creativity; design outcomes are more creative when they are more novel. Biomimetics has emerged as a creativity approach that can lead to generation of novel design concepts. However, not many researchers explored how the degree of novelty of the concepts generated using biomimetic approaches compare with the degree of novelty of concepts generated using existing traditional creative problem solving approaches. In this research we have compared the novelty of design concepts produced by using biological analogies with the novelty of design concepts produced by using traditional brainstorming. Results show that there is an increase in the percentage of highly novel concepts produced in a design task, as well as the novelty of the concept space, when biological analogies are used over traditional brainstorming.