Integrating biology, design, and engineering for sustainable innovation

Bio-inspired design, Biomimicry or Biomimetics is a broad methodology that encourages learning from nature to generate innovative, impactful, and responsible solutions to humankind's problems. As an integrative approach it can be used to teach students across the STEaM disciplines problem solving, design, innovation, and sustainability concepts, as well as strengthen their ability to develop solutions to cross-disciplinary problems. In the Spring 2014 semester we co-taught a course entitled Integrating Biology and Design for Sustainable Innovation at Virginia Tech. The course promoted true interdisciplinary collaboration by integrating teams with backgrounds in life sciences, engineering and design to solve a challenge through a semester long design project. In this paper we discuss our experience teaching the interdisciplinary course, as well as the framework for the course and best practices such that others can implement a similar course at their University. Above all, courses like these are significant in that they take a step towards accelerating sustainable design innovation, an area that has received considerable focus and effort yet whose progress for tangible outcomes has been insufficient.