The Meaning of “Near” and “Far”: The Impact of Structuring Design Databases and the Effect of Distance of Analogy on Design Output

Abstract

This work lends insight into the meaning and impact of "near" and "far" analogies. A cognitive engineering design study is presented that examines the effect of the distance of analogical design stimuli on design solution generation, and places those findings in context of results from the literature. The work ultimately sheds new light on the impact of analogies in the design process and the significance of their distance from a design problem. In this work, the design repository from which analogical stimuli are chosen is the U.S. patent database, a natural choice, as it is one of the largest and easily accessed catalogued databases of inventions. The "near" and "far" analogical stimuli for this study were chosen based on a structure of patents, created using a combination of Latent Semantic Analysis and a Bayesian based algorithm for discovering structural form, resulting in clusters of patents connected by their relative similarity. The findings of this engineering design study are contextualized with the findings of recent work in design by analogy, by mapping the analogical stimuli used in the earlier work into similar structures along with the patents used in the current study. Doing so allows the discovery of a relationship between all of the stimuli and their relative distance from the design problem. The results confirm that "near" and "far" are relative terms, and depend on the characteristics of the potential stimuli. Further, although the literature has shown that "far" analogical stimuli are more likely to lead to the generation innovative solutions with novel characteristics, there is such a thing as too far. That is, if the stimuli are too distant, they then can become harmful to the design process. Importantly, as well, the data mapping approach to identify analogies works, and is able to impact the effectiveness of the design process. This work has implications not only in the area of finding inspirational designs to use for design by analogy processes in practice, but also for synthesis, or perhaps even unification, of future studies in the field of design by analogy.

Inspiration peak: exploring the semantic distance between design problem and textual inspirational stimuli

“…Although research has given some preliminary indications that textual stimuli seem to be potentially useful for creative idea generation (Goldschmidt & Sever, 2010), there was no previous research on how would stimuli with different levels of semantic distance influence idea generation. Therefore, our most relevant finding from this investigation, albeit at times not reaching statistical significance, is the curvilinear pattern observed in the fluency, flexibility, and originality results, which shows that the usefulness of inspiration stimuli can vary in a curvilinear fashion, a tendency also observed by Fu et al (2012). This pattern varies according to the use of 'related', through to 'distant' and finally 'unrelated' textual stimulus, with 'related' and 'unrelated' being less useful for generating creative ideas ( Figure 6).…”

Searching for analogical ideas with crowds

“…We also examined the similarity of the analogies to the given problem, in order to judge whether an analog was a far or near analogy [11]. If an analogy shared surface similarities with the description of the problem, it was classified as a near analog.…”

Function Based Design-by-Analogy: A Functional Vector Approach to Analogical Search

“…The literature on design-by-analogy, distance has been defined thus far in a relatively qualitative and subjective manner-"near-field" being when the target and source of the analogy originate from the same domain of application, and "far-field" being when the target and source of the analogy are from different domains. Work has been done to further formalize and potentially quantify distance of analogy using computational text analysis and structuring of design databases [36], but the field on the whole has not yet defined distance of analogy in a more formal way. The cognitive analogical process is based on the representation and processing of information, and therefore can be implemented in algorithms given an appropriate representation of the information [37,38].…”

“…A method of extracting inherent structure in textual patent data has been implemented for both studying and supporting design-by-analogy [36,73,74]. Szykman et al have built design repositories to share and reuse elements of designs in the development of large scale or complex engineering systems [75].…”