Norbert - regarding your second point, Swedish Biomimetics is extremely careful to keep proper notebooks, dated and signed by the day and inspected regularly. As you say, it's difficult to claim novelty when the idea seems simple. The best ideas are simple, and so (I suppose) the easiest to rip off or deny.
Julian
On 22 Aug 2012, at 22:43, Norbert Hoeller wrote:
> Fil, I included 'novelty' to identify 'me too' designs that claim to be biomimetic but could easily have been developed by a competent engineer without knowledge of biology. It is true that the reverse can occur: once a solution is revealed, it becomes easy to claim that 'anyone could have come up with that answer'. I would accept the somewhat weak situation where the biomimetic inspiration lay in pointing out a problem or solution pathway that had not previously been recognised.
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> Given the ongoing furor about patents, demonstrating novelty is difficult. I think the onus is on the designer to demonstrate that they have done their homework, researched prior art and shown that they have come up with a new solution.
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>>>> Fil's response of August 16
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> Two quick follow-ups, just FYI.
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> 1. Norbert's 3 characteristics align nicely with a 3-part 'definition' of 'creative (designed) things;' where novelty & usefulness transfer directly to the creativity lit that I've seen, and 'practical' corresponds to the attribute of 'cohesion.' So one could argue that Norbert's criteria name designs that are 'creative' - or, that a "good" biomimetic design must be a creative design. I'm not saying that this is good or bad; I'm just noting the similarity.
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> 2. Novelty is relative to be tractable. To determine absolutely that a solution is novel, one must compare it to every other existent solution. Not a good use of one's time/resources. Also, whether something is novel will depend on the level of abstraction used in the comparisons. Then there's context: universal novelty versus novelty in just some particular domain. Which leads to even further graduation, because one can nest contexts very deeply; presumably the broader the context, the more novel a design is.
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> /fas
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