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Natural language approach for bio-informed architectural education: a biomimetic shell design

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Abstract

Biomimicry has been proposed as an important tool to reach key skills for the new century. It has taken its place as an essential resource for critical and creative thinking in design disciplines. However, as emphasized in many studies, bio-informed research requires interdisciplinary collaboration and systematic knowledge transfer. This article answers the question: “How can architects—who have limited knowledge in biology—develop biomimetic ideas and transfer this knowledge to architectural designs?” This research’s hypothesis is that the “natural language approach,” which is frequently used in engineering disciplines, can also be a knowledge transfer tool for the architectural discipline. To test the hypothesis, research was conducted with a group of graduate students taking the “ARCH5661—Parametric Approach to Nature-Inspired Architectures” course in the Department of Architecture, Gazi University, Ankara, Turkey, in the fall semester of 2019. The results were evaluated based on term-long studies and feedback from the students. In light of the obtained data, this article proposes a method that can be used in architectural education and adapted to other design disciplines.

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Notes

  1. Concept mining is the process of extracting meaningful concepts from written sources/texts, audio or visual files (Aydın et al., 2013).

  2. Keywords are character strings used to search for text documents (Cheong, Shu, Stone & McAdams, 2008) or “the word or word group that most clearly reflects the subject” (TDK, 2018).

  3. TDK is the Turkish Language Society, https://sozluk.gov.tr/.

  4. “WordNet® is a large lexical database of English. Nouns, verbs, adjectives and adverbs are grouped into sets of cognitive synonyms (synsets) each expressing a distinct concept. Synsets are interlinked by means of conceptual-semantic and lexical relations. WordNet superficially resembles a thesaurus in that it groups words together based on their meanings.” https://wordnet.princeton.edu/ WordNet is a database containing clusters called synset expressing the relationship between words and it contains many relationships such as synonymy, hypernymy, antonymy, troponym (Aydın, Erkan, Güngör, Takçı, 2014).

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank all the students for their participation, efforts, collaboration and for giving ideas and suggestions for developing the course content. The authors also acknowledge the helpful comments of anonymous reviewers.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Architecture, Gazi University, Ankara, Turkey

    Semra Arslan Selçuk

  2. Department of Architecture, Muş Alparslan University, Muş, Turkey

    Güneş Mutlu Avinç

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  1. Semra Arslan Selçuk
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  2. Güneş Mutlu Avinç
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Correspondence to Güneş Mutlu Avinç.

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Arslan Selçuk, S., Mutlu Avinç, G. Natural language approach for bio-informed architectural education: a biomimetic shell design. Int J Technol Des Educ 32, 2297–2317 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10798-021-09689-z

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