Biological knowledge is becoming an important source of inspiration for developing creative solutions to engineering design problems and even has a huge potential in formulating ideas that can help firms compete successfully in a dynamic market. To identify the technologies and methods that can facilitate the development of biologically inspired creative designs, this research briefly reviews the existing biological-knowledge-based theories and methods and examines the application of biological-knowledge-inspired designs in various fields. Afterward, this research thoroughly examines the four dimensions of key technologies that underlie the biologically inspired design (BID) process. This research then discusses the future development trends of the BID process before presenting the conclusions.

This study aims to explore the key systematic attributes influencing the acceptance of gerontechnology by seniors in response to global aging and rapid technological progress. A meta-analysis was carried out to quantitatively synthesize the results of 25 empirical studies published from 2010 to 2020. After standardized coding and descriptive statistics, as well as tests and analysis of main effects and heterogeneity, publication bias. The following results were obtained: Perceived usefulness and perceived ease of use have a significant positive impact on the user’s attitude and behavioral intention; performance expectancy, effort expectancy, trust, technical performance and subjective norm have a significant positive correlation with the user’s behavioral intention; social influence, facilitating conditions have a positive correlation with the user’s behavioral intention; anxiety has a significant negative correlation to the user’s behavioral intention. The key systematic influencing attributes are classified into three categories: (1) User individual characteristics; (2) product and technical characteristics; and (3) environmental characteristics. This study provides researchers and practitioners with a systematic evidence-based basis to reduce the gap in decision-making for gerontechnology practices.

Analogy-based design is an effective approach for innovative design involving knowledge representation, analogical sources retrieval, mapping between two systems, and adaptation of candidate solutions. The knowledge representation is the first task to determine whether analogy can be implemented successfully. It is, therefore, necessary to have an efficient description method for knowledge representation and information retrieval. Based on the Structure-Behaviour-Function (SBF) model, this paper proposes an R-SBF model to integrate the flow, structure, behaviour and function of design knowledge. Relational types of states are used to describe the information behaviour with relations of ‘and’, ‘or’, ‘not’, ‘sequence’, ‘parallel’ and ‘feedback’. The R-SBF ontology model is constructed using the ontology editing tool Protégé 5.2.0 to link the knowledge representation and analogues retrieval. In the proposed algorithm of computing function similarity, both the semantic similarity and conceptual correlation are considered for the query scalability. The evaluation criteria for feasibility include Recall, Precision, and F-measure. An analogy-aided design innovation software prototype is developed to support the design activity. The improvement of a robot vacuum cleaner is discussed as an example of applications of the proposed method. The solution illustrates the effectiveness of the analogical stimuli to facilitate the design performance.

This paper reports an experiment that aims at providing new evidence to reinforce contradictory conclusions, as available in engineering design literature, on the effect of analogical distance on ideation performance of designers. The experiment involved 84 graduate students in Mechanical Engineering, with typical competencies on engineering design, but without any specific skill on analogy-based idea generation. The subjects were exposed to three different treatments (near-, medium-, far-field analogies) whose design performance has been compared to a control group. The observation confirms that designers not specifically trained in designing-by-analogy get benefit from sources of inspiration that share the same (sub-)functions and context of the target system, as their idea generation process lead to ideas having higher novelty and quality compared to the outcomes of subjects exposed to more distant analogies. The observed results also show that the exploration of the design space gets positively affected.

New product development (NPD) provides an opportunity for companies in the market, but there is a risk of failure if the product cannot satisfy customers. It is therefore important to estimate the success potential of a new product during NPD. According to the product value used in Value Engineering (VE) and product ideality in TRIZ (a Russian acronym for Theory of Inventive Problem Solving), this paper proposes a new structure of product value for NPD. Key factors that affect product value are identified. Methods are proposed to measure changes in the product value comparing a new product with existing products. The analysis of changes in the product value is a way to estimate new products’ success potential, which helps companies make decisions on whether a design should go for production. Four gas cooktop products are used to verify the feasibility and effectiveness of the proposed method.