Applying Principles of Biological Transformation for Product Development and Manufacturing
摘要
Biological Transformation (BT) in manufacturing, also referred to as biologicalization, describes the new paradigm to converge technical, digital, and biological systems to promote sustainability-optimized product and production systems and, thus, meet the current challenges regarding sustainability and resilience. The project BioFusion 4.0 strives to refine Industry 4.0 by integrating biological principles, materials, and organisms. Therefore, relevant principles of Biological Transformation have been identified and classified as a taxonomy. However, there is a strong need for guidance regarding how to apply those principles in the manufacturing industry. Thus, a method to systematically align BT principles with specific technological problems was developed and tested by conducting a workshop series with six technology experts from applied research and industry. The method is based on an iterative top-down approach and follows four basic steps: (1) Characterizing the technological problem functionally and precisely, yet in a universal non-specialist language (including its framework, requirements, and state of development), (2) finding analogies from biology which match the characteristics of the established technical problem without contradiction, (3) identifying suitable biological solution strategies for these specific cases, and (4) abstracting those strategies into technological modes of action by means of the predefined BT principles. This chapter describes the method in detail, gives instructions for applying it, and discusses the central findings of the workshop series on utilizing principles of Biological Transformation for innovating product development.