I study interdisciplinary collaboration, creativity, analogical reasoning, and design cognition in the context of biologically inspired design. Bio inspired design is a new design methodology wherein designers transfer principles and mechanisms of natural systems to their design solutions, inspiring them to be creative and overcome difficult design challenges. Specifically, I observe undergraduate student designers engaged in team-based, interdisciplinary bio inspired design in a semester-long course project. My goals are two-fold: 1, to take bio inspired design as a concrete instance of distributed, multi-cultural, social cognition and use it to understand more about those topics, and 2, to improve our understanding of bio inspired design to help systematize it and teach it to others.
Recent Publications
An Information-Processing Account of Creative Analogies in Biologically Inspired DesignAshok K. Goel, Swaroop Vattam, Michael Helms, & Bryan Wiltgen. To appear in Proc. of 8th ACM Conference on Creativity and Cognition. Atlanta, GA, USA. November 2011.
Case-Based Reasoning All Over the Place: The Multiple Roles of CBR in Biologically Inspired Design
Bryan Wiltgen & Ashok K. Goel. To appear in workshop of Human-Centered and Cognitive Approaches to Case-Based Reasoning at 19th International Conference on Case Based Reasoning. Greenwich, London, UK. September 12, 2011.
News
Internship at SRIThis Summer I am working with Dr. Vinay Chaudhri on his AURA project at SRI. Check it out!
Summer 2011
Passed the Quals!
I passed the first of three major hurdles along the way to earning my doctorate. It was a great learning experience, and I am excited to begin working on my dissertation.
Spring 2011