Effects of Analogous Product Representation on Design-By-Analogy

Design-by-analogy is well-recognized for its power in innovation processes. Understanding the cognitive processes involved in the formation of analogies is important for understanding the concept generation process. This paper takes a distinctive interdisciplinary route to combine research in cognitive psychology and design to develop a more complete understanding design-by-analogy and to provide the basis for formal method development. Designers use numerous external representations in the design processes including, but not limited to, linguistic descriptions of the problems, diagrams and sketches. Information and prior solutions the designer has seen are examples of internal representation. Representation has significant impact on the design-by-analogy process. This paper presents experimental results showing that the representation of a product in a person’s memory and the representation of the design problem influence the person’s ability to solve the design problem based on an analogous product. This experiment shows that appropriate representations facilitate design-by-analogy. A more general semantic description of a product allows for a greater higher likelihood of using a previously experienced product as a source analogy. These results are significant findings, especially regarding their implications on innovation processes, design-by-analogy methods, and design-by-analogy tools. Future work includes experiments to gain a broader knowledge of useful representations, the development of design methods and experimental evaluation of the design-by-analogy methods.