**5. Conclusion**

From an industrial design perspective, the comparative analysis presented suggests that current methods to support bionic design, reported in literature, despite supporting specific goal satisfaction, are not effective across the whole spectrum of typical design goals. All the methods surveyed provide adequate support to the search for paradigm innovation, but form optimization, organization effectiveness and multiple requirement satisfaction are only adequately supported by some of the methods, albeit without any case of adequate support to all five goals found. Communication effectiveness is typically not supported in existing methods. The Aalborg method (Colombo, 2007) is deemed to adequately support attaining organization effectiveness, while the spiral design method (Biomimicry Institute, 2007) is deemed to adequately support attaining form optimization. Finally, the bio-inspired design method (Helms et al., 2009) is deemed applicable for problems seeking multiple requirements satisfaction, especially where trade-offs have to be established. Moreover, little support is given in the methods towards validation activities, concerning the satisfaction of the goals set for the design. The approaches to validation proposed in this chapter, combines engineering approaches with social science approaches to validation, in accordance with the nature of each of the goals focused. This validation process was demonstrated in a design case. Two variations of a novel bionic design for CD and DVD storage were designed using a combination of bio-inspired methods, and were then analysed in terms of satisfaction of requirements and validation of satisfaction of the goals sought, in comparison with a conventional solution for the same problem. This design case hence demonstrated the deployment of the validation process proposed in this chapter.
