scholarly journals Navigating the Tower of Babel: The Epistemological Shift of Bioinspired Innovation

Biomimetics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 60
Author(s):  
Taryn Mead ◽  
David Coley ◽  
D. Scott Borden

The disparity between disciplinary approaches to bioinspired innovation has created a cultural divide that is stifling to the overall advancement of the approach for sustainable societies. This paper aims to advance the effectiveness of bioinspired innovation processes for positive benefits through interdisciplinary communication by exploring the epistemological assumptions in various fields that contribute to the discipline. We propose that there is a shift in epistemological assumptions within bioinspired innovation processes at the points where biological models derived from reductionist approaches are interpreted as socially-constructed design principles, which are then realized in practical settings wrought with complexity and multiplicity. This epistemological shift from one position to another frequently leaves practitioners with erroneous assumptions due to a naturalistic fallacy. Drawing on examples in biology, we provide three recommendations to improve the clarity of the dialogue amongst interdisciplinary teams. (1) The deliberate articulation of epistemological perspectives amongst team members. (2) The application of a gradient orientation towards sustainability instead of a dichotomous orientation. (3) Ongoing dialogue and further research to develop novel epistemological approaches towards the topic. Adopting these recommendations could further advance the effectiveness of bioinspired innovation processes to positively impact social and ecological systems.

2021 ◽  
pp. 105065192110214
Author(s):  
Michelle McMullin ◽  
Bradley Dilger

Academic work increasingly involves creating digital tools with interdisciplinary teams distributed across institutions and roles. The negative impacts of distributed work are described at length in technical communication scholarship, but such impacts have not yet been realized in collaborative practices. By integrating attention to their core ethical principles, best practices, and work patterns, the authors are developing an ethical, sustainable approach to team building that they call constructive distributed work. This article describes their integrated approach, documents the best practices that guide their research team, and models the three-dimensional thinking that helps them develop sustainable digital tools and ensure the consistent professional development of all team members.


2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 571-571
Author(s):  
Debra Parker Oliver

Abstract While it is recognized that caregiver engagement can improve processes and outcomes of care in gerontology, there are barriers to caregiver centered communication, including limited resources for health systems to devote services specifically to families, geographic distance and lack of time. Digital tools such as social media platforms and video-conferencing introduce opportunities for remote and often asynchronous communication. In this presentation, we discuss findings from two randomized clinical trials that explored digital tools to empower family caregivers. In the first we examined ways to use video-conferencing to enable family caregivers to become virtual team members during hospice interdisciplinary teams, and in the second trial we examine the use of secret Facebook groups to meet informational and emotional needs of family caregivers during episodes of care that are often linked to increased social isolation and loneliness. We discuss challenges and opportunities in designing digital tools to facilitate caregiver engagement and empowerment.


Entropy ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 20 (10) ◽  
pp. 752 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesca Tria ◽  
Vittorio Loreto ◽  
Vito Servedio

Zipf’s, Heaps’ and Taylor’s laws are ubiquitous in many different systems where innovation processes are at play. Together, they represent a compelling set of stylized facts regarding the overall statistics, the innovation rate and the scaling of fluctuations for systems as diverse as written texts and cities, ecological systems and stock markets. Many modeling schemes have been proposed in literature to explain those laws, but only recently a modeling framework has been introduced that accounts for the emergence of those laws without deducing the emergence of one of the laws from the others or without ad hoc assumptions. This modeling framework is based on the concept of adjacent possible space and its key feature of being dynamically restructured while its boundaries get explored, i.e., conditional to the occurrence of novel events. Here, we illustrate this approach and show how this simple modeling framework, instantiated through a modified Pólya’s urn model, is able to reproduce Zipf’s, Heaps’ and Taylor’s laws within a unique self-consistent scheme. In addition, the same modeling scheme embraces other less common evolutionary laws (Hoppe’s model and Dirichlet processes) as particular cases.


2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 60-65
Author(s):  

It is the position of American Association of Diabetes Educators (AADE) that all inpatient interdisciplinary teams include a diabetes educator to lead or support improvement efforts that affect patients hospitalized with diabetes or hyperglycemia. This not only encompasses patient and family education but education of interdisciplinary team members and achievement of diabetes-related organizational quality metrics and performance outcomes.


2020 ◽  
Vol 41 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. S228-S229
Author(s):  
Jennifer Schoonard ◽  
Jeanne Lee ◽  
Eli Strait ◽  
Jeremy Cabrera ◽  
Jen Garner

Abstract Introduction The Burn Resuscitation Critical Reflective Practice (CRP) was started as collaborative meetings to review 1st 48 hours of admission for burn resuscitations (resus) October 2018- July 2019. All multi- disciplinary teams were invited. The problem identified was on average burn resus patients (>20% TBSA) were being over resuscitated in 1st 24 hours of admission. The goals of the CRP were: 1) Decrease resus fluid in the 1st 24 hours; 2) Increase knowledge of the current fluid resus pathway; 3) Increase communication with interdisciplinary teams during the resus. Methods CRP initiated in October 2018. 6 CRPs were held October 2018- July 2019.The average ml/ KG/ TBSA prior to CRP from January 2017- September 2018 was 5.17ml/kg/TBSA (goal: < 4ml). Chart reviews were done to gather data from each resus (i.e. urine output, fluids, labs, events). Discussions held with staff involved in the 1st 24 hours of resus regarding any communication/process issues.Patient data was presented & staff members present would discuss questions/ issues that came up during the resus. Multi-disciplinary teams surveyed prior to CRP to assess comfort/competence with current resus pathway and communication. 46 surveys received prior to initiating CRP. After initiating CRP October 2018- July 2019, staff members that had attended >1 CRP were post-surveyed. Results January 2017- October 2018 average ml/ KG/ TBSA was 5.17ml/kg/TBSA. October 2018- July 2019 POST CRP implementation, the avg ml/ KG/ TBSA was 3.86 ml LR/ kg/ TBSA in 1st 24 hours of resus. 3 new practices were implemented 1) Decrease fluids by 200ml/hr (instead of 100) when UOP is >100/hr at least 2 hours into resus; 2) Double sign by 2 RNs required when calculating Parkland Formula; 3) Guideline created to guide communication between Burn RNs & trauma bay when burn resus arrives. Post- survey data showed increase in comfort communicating with physicians regarding resus & increase in comfort/confidence in calculating Parkland Formula. 2 additional subjective questions were added onto the post- CRP survey. Conclusions Fluids given in the 1st 24 hours decreased from 5.17 to 3.86 average ml/ kg/ TBSA post- CRP. 3 new practices were implemented as discussed in results. Staff felt more comfortable communicating with team & calculating Parkland formula. Staff had positive responses on the post- survey. Applicability of Research to Practice The monthly CRPs are to be continued to discuss all burn resus patients received during the prior month. Allows team members to continue to modify practice as needed by what’s learned through each CRP to help better our patient outcomes and decrease overall resus fluids.


Author(s):  
Anastacia MacAllister ◽  
Eliot Winer ◽  
Tsung-Pin Yeh ◽  
Daniel Seal ◽  
Grant Degenhardt

As markets demand engineered products faster, waiting on the cyclical design processes of the past is not an option. Instead, industry is turning to concurrent design and interdisciplinary teams. When these teams collaborate, engineering CAD tools play a vital role in conceptualizing and validating designs. These tools require significant user investment to master, due to challenging interfaces and an overabundance of features. These challenges often prohibit team members from using these tools for exploring alternatives. This paper presents a method allowing users to interact with a design using intuitive gestures and head tracking, all while keeping the model in a CAD format. Specifically, Siemens’ Teamcenter® Lifecycle Visualization Mockup (Mockup) was used to display the design geometry while modifications were made through a set of gestures captured by a Microsoft Kinect™ in real time. This proof of concept program allowed a user to rotate the scene, activate Mockup’s immersive menu, move the immersive wand, and manipulate the view based on head position. The result is an immersive user-friendly low cost platform for interdisciplinary design review.


2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (7/8) ◽  
pp. 334-353 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter R.A. Oeij ◽  
Steven Dhondt ◽  
Jeff Gaspersz

Purpose This paper aims to investigate the principles of high reliability organisations (HROs), present in safety and crisis teams, as applied to innovation teams. Safety and crisis teams cannot fail, as failure leads to disaster and casualties. Innovation teams cannot fail either, as this harms the organisations’ competitiveness and effectiveness. Do HRO principles, rooted in mindful infrastructure, enable innovation resilience behaviour (IRB)? Design/methodology/approach A study of 18 innovation projects performed by project teams was carried out. A survey by team members/leaders of these teams was completed; team members/leaders of other projects were added to achieve a larger sample. Mindful infrastructure consists of team psychological safety, team learning, complexity leadership and team voice. The analyses assessed the teams’ mindful infrastructures as a causal condition enabling IRB. Findings Applying qualitative comparative analysis (QCA), the findings indicate that mindful infrastructure enables team IRB, which is a set of team behaviours indicating their resilience when encountering critical incidents. Teams apply different “paths” to IRB. Research limitations/implications The exploratory study’s generalizability is limited. The findings nonetheless indicate the usefulness of non-linear techniques for understanding different roads to successful innovation processes. Practical implications HRO principles are applicable by non-HROs. These require investments in organisational learning. Originality/value HRO studies fail to account for the antecedents of HRO principles. This study groups these antecedents of team behaviour into a mindful infrastructure. QCA has not been applied within the domain of HROs before and only scarcely within the domain of innovation teams.


Author(s):  
Kaitlyn L. Hale-Lopez ◽  
Abigail R. Wooldridge ◽  
Molly H. Goldstein

Effective teams are essential to meet the complex and dynamic requirements during pandemic response. This case study analyses the work system of mobileSHIELD, a distributed team developing a diagnostic test in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. We conducted interviews with 18 team members to understand how work system design influences the use of technology to support distributed teams. We identified six work system barriers and facilitators. The barriers related to rapidly adopting new technologies and not utilizing features of technologies that support relationships. The facilitators were related to the use of technology to support informal communication, synchronous and asynchronous communication, and mobile technology to improve productivity and collaboration. Our findings indicate technology that is mobile, cloud based, simple and user-friendly can support distributed teams, in particular by improving asynchronous communication. Future research will holistically explore implications for work system design to support interdisciplinary teams responding to societal crises.


Author(s):  
Soo Yeon Leem ◽  
Sang Won Lee

In this paper, the new graduate course, referred to as “Creation and Innovation”, for interdisciplinary design and innovation is introduced based on the collaboration between arts and engineering. In this course, students having various backgrounds in arts and engineering schools participates and forms several interdisciplinary teams for project-based learning. The systematic methods such as Design Thinking Process and Strategic Foresight and Innovation have been combinatorially adopted for this course. Those methods are human-centered approaches, which allow deep understanding on users’ needs and wants by being empathized with users and their environments. This empathy activity can enable the students to actively consider users’ various aspects, which has been of much significance in the current interdisciplinary design education. It is also shown that the collaboration among the team members with the backgrounds of arts and engineering can be effective to generate more creative and innovative ideas by combining their holistic and analytic views.


Author(s):  
Roni Reiter-Palmon ◽  
Salvatore Leone

Interdisciplinary, or cross-functional, teams have become quite common for engineering and design. Many of today’s scientific breakthroughs occur in interdisciplinary teams, as the increasingly complex problems facing society often cannot be addressed by single disciplines alone. However, fostering creative and productive collaboration in interdisciplinary teams is no easy challenge. First, leading creative teamwork is difficult by itself. Second, many of the factors that impede teams and teamwork in general are exacerbated in interdisciplinary teams as a result of differences between team members. In this paper, we will review the team creativity psychology and management literature, and discuss how cognitive processes that facilitate creativity can be used by engineering and design teams. Specifically, past research has shown problem construction that allows teams to develop a structure to guide solving ambiguous problems. Further, problem construction allows teams to develop a shared understanding of the problem which aids in later processes. While there is significant research on idea generation, results suggest that teams may not be better at this than individuals. In this review, we discuss how idea generation in teams can mitigate some of the issues that lead to this effect. Finally, team research has only recently began to determine what factors influence idea evaluation and selection for implementation.


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