How can biological shapes inspire design activity in closed domains?

Biological examples have been used to increase innovation in design activities and design education. And biologically inspired design has been studied in mechanical engineering using biological functions and principles as source domains. However, there were few studies regarding shape-based biological design in industrial design; furthermore, the openness of the source and target domains was vague. This study tries to explore shape-based biological design with closed source domain and closed target domain. In addition, this study aims to figure out students’ difficulties and defects in bionics design to promote design education. Third-year undergraduate students, graduate students, and experts whose backgrounds are industrial design were invited to be participants in the study. Participants of each expertise level were divided into two groups and were given whole and segmented pictures of white sharks individually to design electric cars. Outcome-based validation was chosen to measure the effect of analogy. Multivariate ANOVA was used to evaluate the effect of expertise level and source domain completeness on the results. The findings showed that presenting designers with segmented pictures can increase the number of biological elements and details in the solution. However, there appeared to be no significant difference between the novelty of the work, whether the group received complete or segmented images. Novice designers were more innovative and preferred to use more biological elements during ideation than the experts, while the latter tended to use fewer elements of biology and generated solutions with a higher level of abstraction. For design education, the findings will give teachers advice on how to train and inspire their students in bionics design. For the design industry, segmented biological images can increase the elements used and the details in the sketches. In addition, the evaluation metrics for shape-based BID established in this study can help designers and manufacturers in terms of production.