Meeting Abstract
At Georgia Tech, we teach an interdisciplinary bio-inspired design class with teams made up of biology, mechanical engineering, materials science, biomedical engineering, and architectural/industrial designers. Bio-inspired design provides a framework for teaching the fundamentals of interdisciplinary work, including how to find, read and understand biology papers, how to decompose problems, and how to ensure that a biological understanding will translate to solving their technical challenge. Ultimately in the course, students use these biological “wonders of the world” to create better and more sustainable engineered designs. The resulting student innovations are always astonishing; but more importantly, the students learn how to communicate and work across disciplines. This bio-inspired design framework provides one way for teaching the next generation how to deal with today’s complex, multi-disciplinary design challenges.
