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© 2016 Elsevier Ltd With a two-decade consistent research interest for Systematic Biologically-Inspired Design, a number of methods and tools to support bio-ideation have been proposed. However, objective quantification of the effects these aids have on the design outcomes is rare. This contribution presents an impact analysis of the most popular knowledge-based tool, AskNature, in the form of an outcome-based study. The results consistently support a common claim used in favour of bio-inspired design, i.e. the expectation of identifying more out-of-the-box solutions. Furthermore, to further facilitate biological solution analysis and cross-domain knowledge transfer, an adaptation to AskNature's stimuli format — i.e. adding a graphical illustration of the biological solution principle — is validated to further boost novelty. ispartof: Design Studies vol:46 pages:152-173 status: published

As Biologically-Inspired Design is receiving more and more attention, methodologies and tools are developed to support the systematic bio-ideation process. However, few experiments have been conducted that objectively measure the impact of bio-ideation methods or tools on the design outcomes of creativity efforts. This paper investigates the impact of two biological stimuli conditions – using short natural-language descriptions accompanied by a photograph of the involved biological system (1) or accompanied by a graphical illustration of the biological solution principle (2) – on the variety of the generated idea set. Hereto, biological strategies from one relevant functional class of AskNature’s Biomimicry Taxonomy are used as stimuli and their impact is quantified. Participants, 59 students divided into three groups, are all submitted to the no tool condition for a first design challenge from which the intended balancing effect of random group assignment is verified. During the second and third challenge, one group remains a control group and two groups receive one of the AskNature stimuli variants. The results show variable success for increasing variety – ranging from status quo to a 108.2% increase in variety at the physical principle level – indicating that using a functional category from AskNature has the potential to support conceiving more dissimilar idea set on the most abstract levels of the genealogy tree. However such performance is not guaranteed for each challenge. ispartof: pages:173-178 ispartof: Procedia CIRP vol:39 pages:173-178 ispartof: Structured Innovation with TRIZ in Science and Industry: Creating Value for Customers and Society location:Berlin date:26 Oct - 29 Oct 2015 status: published

© 2017 Much work on sustainable design has focused on product manufacture/assembly and end of life. Gains in products’ technical efficiency address the use phase, but how these products are used clearly affects resource consumption. This paper describes two main approaches to reduce resource consumption during product life. Firstly, interventions aim to change user behavior, through information and feedback, as well as physical product affordances abstracted from lead users to guide or steer users toward the desired behavior. Secondly, automatic adjustment of product systems performance levels based on personal user profiles and anticipated usage is implemented using artificial intelligence techniques. ispartof: CIRP Annals. Manufacturing Technology vol:66 issue:2 pages:635-658 status: published

Systematically developing innovative products demands effective idea generation methods. The effectiveness can be verified based on a set of metrics, of which the variety metric is one. It is demonstrated that this metric exhibits several shortcomings, such as the lack of level-based measurements, and arbitrarily defined level weights. The currently applied variety metrics, furthermore, do not measure the degree of uniformness of the distribution of ideas over nodes on an abstraction level. A level-based, correctly normalized variety metric which accounts for the degree of uniformness of the distribution of concepts over nodes, is proposed, and is shown to resolve the above issues. ispartof: Design Studies vol:34 issue:2 pages:243-263 status: published

Patent repositories are considered as a state of the art in innovation efforts for specific product categories. Using text mining techniques on selected word categories in such repositories, complemented by a dimensional reduction method, generic product aspects are identified, allowing systematic quantification of the development state of product categories. The derived product profiles are applied for systematic identification of product categories that can contribute to the further development of selected product aspects for a product of interest. The effectiveness of this methodology was experimentally validated, demonstrating the significance of the proposed design-by-analogy approach based on the described product aspect analysis. © 2011 CIRP. ispartof: CIRP Annals. Manufacturing Technology vol:60 issue:1 pages:203-206 status: published

During problem solving, TRIZ users map a specific problem to a generic problem, solve it via TRIZ tools, and map back to a specific solution, a process relying heavily on their TRIZ skills. To aid less skilled users, a methodology and algorithm are proposed that, through identification of specific word categories in patents, analysis of term-term correlation data, and data mining techniques, automatically identify similar products, and properties relating or differentiating products. This algorithm can quantifiably guide creativity efforts and aid in patent portfolio management. © 2011 Published by Elsevier Ltd. ispartof: pages:83-88 ispartof: Proceedings of the ETRIA TRIZ Future 2008 vol:9 pages:83-88 ispartof: ETRIA TRIZ Future 2008 location:Twente, Nederland date:5 Nov - 7 Nov 2008 status: published