Practitioners across domains—from architectural design (Zari, 2010; Ha and Lu, 2020), medical interventions (Chen et al., 2021), and robotics (Coyle et al., 2018; Ahmed et al., 2022) to materials science (Wegst et al., 2015)—are increasingly drawing inspiration from biology to address a wide range of challenges. This is perhaps unsurprising because life on earth represents over 3.8 billion years of evolution, whereby natural selection ruthlessly purges design failures. Despite the growth and promise of biomimetic and bioinspired approaches, the analogy to biological form or function is often superficial or largely figurative. This Research Topic was born from the topic editors' shared belief that to capitalize on insights from biology, we need to move beyond figurative referencing toward functional analogy informed by accurate biological knowledge. For this reason, we advocate a biologically-informed (or bio-informed) approach that captures key properties of living organisms and systems, such as sustainability, multifunctionality and self-assembly.

The articles collected in this interdisciplinary Research Topic illustrate the strengths of a bio-informed approach to design processes and applications. Ultimately, the goal is to demonstrate how simple concepts can be abstracted from highly complex and inter-connected biological materials, structures and processes to be applied or manufactured at scale.

A bio-informed approach requires deep collaboration between biologists and practitioners in other fields. To gauge the current extent of engagement with biologists in biomimetic and bioinspired research,Ng et al. surveyed the literature over 30 years (1990–2020) to reveal that only 41% of research papers published in the field included an author affiliated to a biology-related department, and most of them focus on a limited range of popular model species. The authors show the value of capitalizing on biological diversity and understanding the ecological and evolutionary context of the biological models. They also highlight that interdisciplinary engagement is a two-way street—for example, application of engineering approaches can improve biological understanding just as biology can offer new engineering solutions.