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Adaptive Design

Adaptive design is the engineering of a physical system to self-adapt in response to changing environments. Adaptive design should be contrasted with the more commonly applied static design. A system with static design will typically not be equipped for self-modification and is engineered to deal with a small range of environmental change, without significantly changing state throughout its lifetime. A system with adaptive design, on the other hand, will be equipped to self-modify into any of a flexible set of system-states in order to navigate, function and succeed in different environments.

Currently, genuinely adaptive systems are quite primitive and rare. One of the most difficult and most important engineering tasks in the current millennium will be to develop and discover methodologies for the design of adaptive systems. Such systems could revolutionize the world in which we live. Conceptually, such systems are not difficult to envision: robots able to traverse any terrestrial terrain, self-repairing asphalt, adaptive vehicles that are self-directed and provide close to perfect safety mechanisms, etc.

While such systems are conceptually bountiful, the methodology for designing non-rigid adaptive systems is still in its infancy. Adaptive design is significantly more sophisticated and difficult than static design, but nature has given us numerous models of real-world adaptive systems to learn from. The science of discovering and imitating natural adaptive systems is called biomimicry.

Web Resources On Adaptive Design

http://www.biomimicry.net/

Book Resources On Adaptive Design

Biomimicry by Janine M. Benyus
Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things by William McDonough
Biomimicry for Optimization, Control, and Automation by Kevin M. Passino

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