Visual Analogy—a Strategy for Design Reasoning and Learning

Publisher Summary This chapter proposes that the use of visual analogy in problem solving is an example of similarity-based reasoning, cognitively facilitated by imagistic operations. It is shown that in designing, which is an example of ill-structured problem solving, this type of reasoning is most valuable. Evidence proves that novices, in particular, benefit from guidance to use analogy, which helps them to better understand abstract concepts and to fully exploit their capacity to retrieve and implement previously acquired knowledge. People can be trained to maximize the processing resources they are endowed with. Novices can be shown how the use of a certain cognitive strategy, analogic reasoning in this case, can be beneficial to them. At the same time, repeated use can help stabilize domain-knowledge in their memory, such that in subsequent cases it might require less effort, i.e., a lower-level processing mechanism, to retrieve and activate that knowledge. Novices who exercise analogical reasoning eventually appropriate the abstractions, implicitly or explicitly, thereby gaining in knowledge and in the ability to apply it. The use of analogy therefore brings similarity-based and rule-based reasoning very close together, and enables them to interact successfully in problem solving. In this interaction reasoning by similarity is typically helpful as a triggering device in the early phases of a search for ideas, whereas reasoning by rules follows suite in subsequent phases of development, refinement, and evaluation.