Bio-Inspiration in Design

The talk explores the state of the art in engineering design inspired by nature with examples mostly from the domain of structural engineering.  Three categories of inspiration will be discussed, including visual, conceptual, and computational inspiration.  The focus will be on the computational inspiration, including evolutionary and co-evolutionary computation, and cellular automata.  Also, the process of morphogenesis in nature will be explained in the context of generative representations, which have great potential for generation of novel designs.  Finally, the most promising directions for future research will be briefly presented.

Whole Brain Engineering Education

Today engineering students are mostly educated how to become the analysis experts capable of using their knowledge to conduct the analysis of complex engineering systems, both built and abstract.  Such deductive thinking can be compared to the left hemisphere thinking.  It is absolutely necessary but grossly insufficient to meet challenges of the 21st Century.  Engineers must be educated how to develop novel designs and that requires teaching them how to use the right hemisphere, or creative thinking, which is based mostly on abduction. 

In the talk the current state of the art in engineering education will be presented in the context of the related activities of the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) and of the book “Civil Engineering Body of Knowledge for the 21st Century,” published by the ASCE in February this year.  (The speaker is one of many co-authors of this book).  The proposed changes will be briefly overviewed and used later in the talk as a reference point.

A new concept of the engineering education will be presented, which is based on the Theory of Successful Intelligence.  This theory was recently proposed in the cognitive psychology and is based on the fundamental assumption that a person needs to learn three types of intelligence to become successful.  They include the practical, analytical, and creative intelligence.  All three types are absolutely necessary and they are an equivalent of “whole brain thinking.”