NATURALLY ORIGINAL: STIMULATING CREATIVE DESIGN THROUGH BIOLOGICAL ANALOGIES AND RANDOM IMAGES

Numerous methods exist to support divergent thinking in creativity, Bioinspired design is one such method, where distant analogies are used to support the creative process. This paper focuses upon understanding the effects of using stimuli from biology as compared to other creative methods. The research is primarily interested in the benefit of using inspiration from biology for supporting engineering design, hence the effect of using biological analogies was investigated and rather than comparing this to no stimuli, random images were used as a control. Experiments were conducted with two industrial problems, and industrial participants. The experiment showed that it is possible to use distant analogies, i.e. biocards, to increase originality of the solutions. Although previous studies have shown this when compared to no method, this was also found to be true against another source of stimuli (the random images), this is an important finding to encourage research in bioinspired design.

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