Engineering design, as the science framing the practice of design through the elaboration of tools and processes, is constantly evolving towards new innovative strategies. To thrive in their extremely competitive environment, it appears that both industrial and natural worlds are highly dependent on innovation, optimisation and selection. These commonalities have led designers to look to living beings for inspiration. This innovation strategy, referred to as biomimetics, isn’t a new approach but its methodological aspects are still under development. This article deals with biologists’ contribution throughout the biomimetic design process. After introducing the context and the experimental protocol, we investigated the impact of possessing a background in biology during the practice of biomimetics and compared our findings with experts’ opinion. The main idea of this article is to show that to forego the integration of biologists is highly restrictive and may be one of the reasons explaining the difficulties of implementing biomimetics in the industrial context. Hence, this article argues for a new methodological framework taking into account biologists, allowing biomimetic teams to become truly interdisciplinary.

中文翻译：

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仿生学，生物学家在哪里？

工程设计作为通过详细阐述工具和流程来构建设计实践的科学，正在不断朝着新的创新策略发展。为了在竞争激烈的环境中茁壮成长，工业和自然世界似乎都高度依赖创新、优化和选择。这些共性促使设计师从生物中寻找灵感。这种被称为仿生学的创新战略并不是一种新方法，但其方法论方面仍在开发中。本文讨论生物学家在整个仿生设计过程中的贡献。在介绍了背景和实验方案后，我们调查了在仿生学实践中拥有生物学背景的影响，并将我们的发现与专家的意见进行了比较。本文的主要思想是表明放弃生物学家的整合具有高度限制性，可能是解释在工业环境中实施仿生学困难的原因之一。因此，本文主张一种新的方法论框架，将生物学家考虑在内，使仿生团队成为真正的跨学科。