Enhancing the Pedagogy of Bio-inspired Design in an Engineering Curriculum

In addition to providing the technical expertise required to solve 21 century problems, the engineers of 2020 will be expected to adapt to a continuously evolving environment while operating outside the limits of their discipline and remaining ethically grounded. Their undergraduate training must therefore be designed to nurture engineers to transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries, and to communicate, transfer knowledge, and collaborate across technical and nontechnical boundaries. One approach to this challenge is to incorporate biomimicry or bio-inspired design into the engineering curriculum. Our research aims to create instructional resources that provide exposure to the abundance of design examples that can be found in nature, and scaffold the discovery and knowledge transfer processes so that those natural designs can be used to inspire engineering solutions. This research is expected to produce knowledge that will improve student learning, STEM literacy, cross-disciplinary thinking, and innovation. Bio-inspired design is also expected to enhance the diversity and inclusion of ideas, and to attract women and minority students with diverse backgrounds to pursue STEM fields. Its ultimate benefit, we hope, will be to fuel the design innovations needed to create a more sustainable future for humankind.