Testing ideation performance on a large set of designers: effects of analogical distance

Abstract

Testing ideation performance on a large set of designers: effects of analogical distance This paper reports an experiment that aims at providing new evidence to reinforce contradictory conclusions, as available in engineering design literature, on the effect of analogical distance on ideation performance of designers. The experiment involved 84 graduate students in Mechanical Engineering, with typical competencies on engineering design, but without any specific skill on analogy-based idea generation. The subjects were exposed to three different treatments (near-, medium-far-field analogies) whose design performance has been compared to a control group. The observation confirms that designers not specifically trained in designing-by-analogy get benefit from sources of inspiration that share the same (sub-)functions and context of the target system, as their idea generation process lead to ideas having higher novelty and quality compared to the outcomes of subjects exposed to more distant analogies. The observed results also show that exploration of the design space gets positively affected.

Analogue and Digital Access to Architectural Information

“…Advanced students have reported less obvious goals that result in more successful structural analogies [4], which may correlate with the type of documents they are looking for or with their search habits. In fact, novice designers benefit more from more specific sources of inspiration [26]. Furthermore, it has been shown that architecture students can develop this design by analogy ability, moving from literal similarity to analogical similarity [27].…”

Do All Creative Stimuli Work the Same? Insights From a Workshop With Professionals

“…Authors such as Gonçalves et al (2016), Bonnardel and Marmèche (2004) and Ozkan and Dogan (2013) have worked on seeing how ideas from individual novice and experts differ in terms of their inspirations and analogical thinking while designing. Others have found that the stimuli related to near-field analogies are useful in generating ideas with higher novelty in the case of teams of nontrained designers who were graduate students (Jia et al, 2019). Most of the authors base their findings on results obtained from teams of students, who potentially behave differently than professionals (Chai, 2015).…”

“…For instance, their effects have been compared by distinguishing different facets of the contents the stimuli embedded. For instance textual vs graphical stimuli (Cardoso et al, 2012), function and context relatedness to the target design domain (Jia et al, 2019), word relatedness (Chiu and Shu, 2012) as well as solutions described in patents coming from "near" and "far" design domains when compared to the target domain (Fu et al, 2013). All the above-mentioned studies aimed at triggering some analogies by exposing the recipient to prior solutions and/or examples of ideas and concepts.…”

“…The purpose was to check the effectiveness of stimuli to drive the exploration of the design space towards areas that are less intuitive to access during ideation. The experiment was organized into two rounds for ideation (60 minutes each) with a 20-minute break between rounds, as for Jia et al (2019) and Saliminamin et al (2019). The first round is carried out with no stimulation, beyond the crossfertilization due to idea exchange of typical brainstorming.…”

A review of design intelligence: progress, problems, and challenges

“…Analogical relation is a typical thinking paradigm to associate concepts, and it is widely used in the ideation process (Gilon et al, 2018;Jia et al, 2020). "the Retriever" (Han et al, 2018) is a retrieval tool to present analogically related images or language terms.…”