Transcript

TEDxGeorgiaTech - Jeannette Yen - Biologically Inspired Design For An Interdisciplinary Education

so I'm a biologist I teach at a um well-known engineering Institute in the southeast of the United States Georgia Tech I support these statements about education where once Nations measured their strength in the size of their armies and their arsenals the world of the future in the world of the future knowledge matters most if you solve the education problem you don't have to do anything else if you don't solve it nothing else is going to matter all that much I think teamwork is the way to solve complex problems effectively as you see here interdisciplinary teams there's a Synergy I've got a Synergy between biologists Architects Engineers public policy makers and artists nature also uses teamwork and I know this from experience I'm a biological oceanographer I study how Plankton communicate underwater I work with a fluid physicist so I work at the interface between science and engineering and we come up with novel solutions that our community appreciates I want to share this path to Discovery however learning is organized by discipline students get taught biology and chemistry and physics and Engineering in separate classes in fact one of our engineering students remarked I know some biology Majors but interacting with them this in this class really surprised me about how differently people of different disciplines think it's surprising how specialized we become um just after two or three years without realizing this so how do we break down these barriers between silos what does this look like how about this a whale and a turbine perfect biology and Technology what is this field called biologically inspired design here Frank Fish a fellow marine biologist learn that the bumps or tubercles on the Leading Edge of the whale fin allows it to maneuver and now they've put it on a wind turbine and they're able to capture wind energy at lower wind speeds but the most famous uh bioinspired design is velcro it's used here when the B Burr stuck to the fur the inventor's light bulb went off in Sir George mol and here we see it on on the glove of the astronauts glove of John Young Georgia Tech graduate of 52 and so now kids don't even know how to tie their shoelaces so how do we teach this we developed a course in biologically inspired design it I advertised it to biologists but also many different um Engineers mechanical engineering industrial and systems engineering polymer and textile engine engineering and material science engineering I ask the students to find a problem that they're passionate about solving and here's where the Magic Begins okay here's here's our class we have 40 students there's eight teams five uh students per team there has to be at least one biologist I ask them to um have a design they name it so here we have leverage it's a hierarchical structure iron bumper a layered composite it system that dissipates impact inspired by the abalone shell here we've got flotex a transpiration curtain inspired by the redwood tree desert Chiller across a a countercurrent cooling system like in flamingo legs Nola a um Bion sparred Levy system for the New Orleans Louisiana area raw power a color sensitive heat regulator inspired by the chameleon or the the Portuguese tortoise Beetle sep event a wind flat wind capture system and symphonic an aid for the visually impaired in this class we have 39% of them are are women we also in in this particular class we have 57% are Engineers 9% are designers although this fall it looks like I'm going to get a whole um a higher percentage of designers we've got 5% that are computational and then 29% are biologists and you see that there has to be at least one biologist per te when you have two it gets a little bit livelier so let's see let's see uh what we do is in the class we teach them content by teaching them lectures about Evolution and assessing biological function and case studies by experts in the field of biologically inspired design and then we practice we practice search strategies we practice an analogical reasoning problem decomposition quantitative assignments and so the but the First first day or the first week they take a walk through nature and study the life around them now this doesn't really look like Atlanta landscape or Atlanta Wildlife but these are photos that I've taken of the natural systems around on this planet Earth and so these are the sources of biological problem solving principles the students come back to class and they have to share their findings with their teammates and with their their classmates and this is a typical interdisciplinary communication so I'd like to illustrate the cross talk so the biologist says check it out I've got this dead fish to swim upstream gnarly engineer says hm the resonant frequency of that dead fish must be equal to the strw hall frequency of the vortices shed by that bluff body fascinating so to help them communicate uh asok goel of the design and intelligence Lab at Georgia Tech gave us a tool that humans use to think about design it's called structure Behavior function or what how why when the students come in and describe a bone or the strut of an airplane R Wing they have have to limmit their discussion to what Co what is an issue so the Lamar or layered structure of the bone how does it work it reacts to Mechanical stress why is it important the bone is able to adapt to the stress of the environment we also give them another tool analogical reasoning and bioinspired design is perfect for analogical reasoning it's the transference of one idea from one domain to another by bioinspired design works by transferring by making analogies between biology and engineering and this um Fosters creativity and Innovation as an example of an analogy sticking is a function that depends on toxic glue but to stick like a gecko a gecko doesn't use glue it doesn't use doesn't use Su suction it actually relies on a completely different way of sticking and this inspired a completely different dry adhesive by my friend uh Keller Autumn the gecko guy you go into his house in Oregon and the entryway is a climbing wall so now I'd like to give three examples of of some bio inspired designs that come out of my class one is the wind schools okay look this is the group we've got a nuclear engineer with a biologist with an aerospace engineer mecky mechi and a graphics designer they were passionate about trying to solve the trying to capture wind energy but they hated that birds and bats got caught in the turbine so they turned to nature for inspiration they looked at how nature uses in uses free energy they looked at how maple seeds capture um are able to autog gyate just by passive shape structure they looked at jellyfish and they're they pulsed to capture the the U vortices left by their previous pulse the geese fly in v formation the Dolphins are able to walk on water they took these and they studied and they um how these things work they went deep into the Lit Literature to dig out the key um pieces of information they spoke to silus album he's a mathematician here about his work on flapping foils they read nature they read fluids instruction pnas science journal of fluid mechanics physical review letters these are undergraduates that were going to the primary literature they figured out how dead fish swim upstream they rely on vortices Bluff bodies and flexible compliant bodies they read the work of Mimi Cole on on ecomorphology of the kelp blade and ruffled blades are able to um um receive sunlight for a greater photosynthesis and enhances photosynthesis and then they figured it out they put a compound analogy they put fish schools together with ruffled kelp and they came up with the wind flag Farm a um p Electric fluttering flags made of peo electric fabric arranged in a school formation isn't that beautiful would you have thought of something so creative okay well they were just ready for their final presentation and the day before they were scooped so an engineer at Caltech announced John debery announced on MSNBC schooling fish Inspire efficient wind farms the team just couldn't believe what they read but I was so proud of them because they were able to make something so creative and interesting within a 1 15 semester um uh semester 15we semester now we are involved with Georgia Tech housing to put um bped uh wind projects around campus this was put up two weeks ago North Atlant um Apartments we also are looking at the Yellowstone ecosystem the Hors class looked at the um organisms there and we're focusing on the Quaking Aspen and their response to wind and this helps bioinspired Design Concepts increases the value of nature to the public and so this brings me to my second example Chima parkour body armor parkour man that is a rough sport you have to be agile you have to be flexible and you have to be precise so they talked to Y he Chang he's the applied physiologist here on campus and identified that they wanted to protect the spine they did a functional decomposition of the sport of parkour and they focused on impact two functions impact and flexibility and then look to nature for inspiration they had 25 different natural systems they narrowed it down to four the Hedgehog spines they allow them to bounce the layered composite structure of the scaly foot snail dissipates impact cat's pads are protect where it's needed most and the armadillo inspired plates um fold and collapse during the parkour roll and so voila here is your Chimera okay so take the challenge do um we chimera on your NE when you next play parkour and this team then for their fi for their second design wanted to address um solar energy collection they were not satisfied with the efficiency of these solar arrays so they looked to plants and how they um Bend towards the light they found out that this hormone um um enabled the cells to gather up water so that they extend it and push the plant toward the Sun okay and then they again did a superb job of analyzing the function and breaking down this complex function function of maximizing solar energy collection by the plant into two functions hormone regulation and hydraulic actuation then they also broke down the um technological solution of maximizing solar energy collection and they were able to match the plant function to the tracking function of the technological design and they came up with a biologically inspired Sun tracking system the heat exchanger expands the fluid and causes the opposite side to tilt towards the Sun so these were three out of more than 40 different ideas that have been generated over the past six years that we've offered this course it's currently supported by the division of undergraduate education at SF and I use them to illustrate how we Foster team creativity team based creativity the five learning goals for transference of biological principles to human design challenges are these novel techniques for creativity interdisciplinary communication skills knowledge about domains it's outside the core training the interdisciplinary design process and the application of knowledge across domains so I'd like to conclude with some remarks that the students make in their final Reflections to illustrate how they reach these learning skills so this class was the first class that I've had that combined analogous biological phenomena to develop solutions for engineering problems I have also learned to communicate a with those in other fields more effectively and hopefully communicate with those in my own field more more effectively working with two biologists in my group over the course of the semester I think I did learn how to better understand biological systems and speak in biological terms this course has changed my perspective on the interactions between biology and design and it continually altered and expanded my understanding of how to engage in successful design thank you very much