Ken, I find it difficult to understand why you ‘shared’ this article.
This is not a particularly startling or informative article. Although it offers a new contribution to knowledge in its field, appears to be a part of PhD studies, and is a good example of how to write a research paper, I cannot see much relevance of this particular study of animal innovation to PhD design research. (Please don’t respond with a long exposition of why it might be.)
There has in fact been considerable attention paid to ‘non-human designers’. See, for example, Reader, S.M. and K.N. Laland (eds.) ‘Animal Innovation’, Oxford UP, 2003. We know that animals use found objects as tools, and this form of ‘innovation’ may be a precursor of humans adapting found objects and then deliberately making and then designing new tools. See the theme issue of Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B - Biological Sciences on ‘Innovation in animals and humans: understanding the origins and development of novel and creative behaviour’ (vol. 371, no. 1690, 2016.) https://royalsocietypublishing.org/toc/rstb/2016/371/1690
What might be particularly relevant to design research would be to consider whether the abilities suggested in examples of animal innovation shed any light on the complex cognitive abilities evident in human design thinking, such as the paper by Andy Dong, Emma Collier-Baker and Thomas Suddendorf, referenced below.
Nigel
Building blocks of human design thinking in animals
Andy Dong, Emma Collier-Baker and Thomas Suddendorf
International Journal of Design Creativity and Innovation
Vol. 5, Nos. 1–2, pp. 1– 15, 2017
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/21650349.2015.101170
Abstract: Observations of animal innovations range from tool making by chimpanzees to elaborately decorated nests made by bowerbirds. Such behaviours raise fundamental questions about the differences between human design thinking and the capacity of nonhuman animals to create novel objects and environments. While none of these animal innovations are based upon what we would describe as design thinking, elements of the cognitive skills that make up design thinking may exist in other species, even if they do not exist as a complete package or to the same degree of skill as in humans. Animal innovations thus provide a unique window into human design thinking. Using a comparative approach, we discuss three cognitive skills that are likely to be fundamental to the conceptual system of human design thinking: recursion, representation, and curiosity. There is evidence of two of these capacities in nonhuman animals.
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