Biomimicry for sustainability : an educational project in sustainable product design

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2012

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Bakırlıoğlu, Yekta

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The notion of sustainability has become an extensive area of research ever since the term emerged in the late 1980s, due to the negative effects of unsustainable production and consumption patterns on environmental stewardship, social equity and economic development. There have been various approaches developed for product design and education within the context sustainability. Biomimicry is one of those approaches, and its implications for product design education have recently started to be explored. In this study, an educational tool - Biomimicry Sketch Analysis (BSA) - was developed and integrated into the idea-generation phase of an educational design project at the undergraduate level in the Department of Industrial Design at the Middle East Technical University (METU). This integration is analyzed throughout the graduate thesis study, to understand and explore the implications of the biomimicry approach for sustainability in product design education. The educational tool within this approach was found as influential among the third year industrial design students for the idea-generation phase, yet the results of this study included both pros and cons for the incorporation of the BSA exercise.

Subject Keywords

Product design., Industrial design., Industrial design, Biomimicry., Sustainable design.

URI

http://etd.lib.metu.edu.tr/upload/12614721/index.pdf
https://hdl.handle.net/11511/22135

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Graduate School of Natural and Applied Sciences, Thesis

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Citation Formats

Y. Bakırlıoğlu, “ Biomimicry for sustainability : an educational project in sustainable product design,” M.S. - Master of Science, Middle East Technical University, 2012.