The Effect of Functional Modeling on Understanding Complex Biological Systems

Biologically inspired engineering design requires understanding of complex biological systems for use as analogues in engineering designs. In this study we seek to understand how functional representations, in particular Structure-BehaviorFunction (SBF) models, enable understanding complex biological systems. Results from this study indicate that SBF representations may enable more accurate inferences about biological systems for complex and abstract questions than purely textual, or textual and diagrammatic, representations. They also suggest that no one representation is best for all types of inferences. BACKGROUND, MOTIVATION AND GOALS Biologically inspired (or biomimetic) design is an important and growing movement in design [1-4]. The movement is driven in part by the need for environmentally sustainable development, and partly by the recognition that nature can be a powerful source of inspiration for technological innovations. This, in turn, is driving development of educational courses and programs in biologically inspired design as well as interactive computational tools for supporting biologically inspired design in practice. The Biomimcry Guild’s web portal called AskNature (http://www.asknature.org), for example, provides access to an online functionally-indexed database of research articles in biological sciences. Georgia Tech’s Center for Biologically Inspired Design (http://www.cbid.gatech.edu/), as another example, offers a popular senior-level interdisciplinary course on biologically inspired design, and is planning undergraduate and graduate curriculums in the emerging interdiscipline. Despite these and other pioneering efforts, at present there is no science of biologically inspired design, and its practice remains scattered, empirical and ad hoc. This ad hoc character of biologically inspired design, we conjecture, is in no small part due to its interdisciplinarity. This interdisciplinarity raises several fundamental questions such as: How do biologists and engineers work together in teams? What is the extent of their shared lexicon? How do engineers and biologists understand design problems? How do they communicate design ideas across disciplines? How do biologists and engineers understand 1 Copyright © 2010 by ASME Proceedings of the ASME 2010 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference IDETC/CIE 2010 August 15-18, 2010, Montreal, Quebec, Canada