Design-by-Analogy is an approach that is widely embraced by engineers and designers seeking innovative designs. The identification of analogies for use in engineering design problems is usually a spontaneous action that is brought about by accident and not by a systematic design process applied during the idea generation stage of new product development. A Design-by-Analogy method developed to lead designers systematically to analogies that can be useful for solving design problems is the WordTree Method. The WordTree Method uses the semantic relationships between verbs, extracted from design problems, to lead engineers and designers to potentially useful analogies. The WordTree Method is a relatively new design method, and as with any new design method, there is room for improvement. In this thesis, a tool called WordTree Express (WTE) was developed to automate the generation of the database-based WordTrees used during the application of the WordTree Method. This tool (WTE) showed, from an experiment, that its implementation had a positive effect on the opinions of the engineers and designers who used it for solving a design problem. The effects found from surveying the participants suggested that the participants were more likely to apply the method in their future design problems with the WTE tool than when they applied the method without the WTE tool. Although the WTE tool did not show statistical significance (p<0.1) in increasing the number of analogies identified by the participants, compared to the non-automated method, it did enable the process of identifying analogies to be done faster. Tools designed to perform tasks faster and more efficiently usually tend to have a positive effect on its users. Different ontologies were studied for their value in the application to Design-by-Analogy in engineering. Recommendations for further work advancing the WordTree Method and contributions to Design-by-Analogy are presented in the future work section.

Idea generation is one of the major initial steps of the design process. Designers frequently use analogies to explain concepts, predict potential problems, and generate ideas. Analogous design can stimulate idea generation and lead to novelty and creativity. At present, there is little research that explores analogous design under the presence of irrelevant information, 'noise', or the effects of using analogies from semantically distant domains. An "Analogies and Noise" experiment extends previous findings which indicate that the use of two analogues instead of one can enhance analogous transfer. It tests whether this holds true for increased numbers of analogies. This study hypothesizes that analogue transfer improves with increasing number of example analogues and deteriorates under the presence of noise. The experiment evaluated this hypothesis by presenting designers with a design problem and a set of analogues and noise. Improvement was primarily measured by the rate of participants identifying the relevant high level principle (HLP). The results indicate that: (1) recognition of HLPs deteriorates under noise (2) increasing numbers of analogues under noise initially improves HLP recognition; however, once many items are present, designers are overwhelmed and the HLP recognition rate decreases (3) using two analogues is optimal for design and (4) noise cannot be defined as all those items without a functional feature relevant to the problem. A "Distant Domains" pilot experiment explores the use of distant-domain analogies. This study hypothesizes that distant domain analogies lead to more abstraction resulting in more creative designs. The experiment presented participants with a predetermined set of analogues then asked them to solve a problem. The set contained analogies from the problem domain and from a domain of varying distance. The following patterns were observed: (1) the number of emergent features peaked with near-domain analogies and decreased thereafter (2) the mean total number of ideas increased with increasing domain (3) designers deemed analogies from distant domains as 'less useful' and solutions generated using distant domains as 'less effective' and 'less practical'. These trends warrant future experimentation with an increased sample size.

Well developed innovation processes are becoming an essential component to the continued success of a large number of industries. Such processes build upon the evolutionary steps taken to advance innovation. In light of the need for innovation, companies and engineers must create the most efficient processes for their systems or product development teams. A step toward the creation of such processes, as well as the corresponding teaching of such processes in higher-education, is the development of a baseline of current best practices. This paper considers a contribution to this effort in the form of a study of a specific group of innovation practitioners. The study was created to probe a group of leaders in the engineering design domain using technical, demographic, and short answer questions. Various analysis methods are used to obtain a fundamental view of the answers to the questions but also the demographics of the participant group. Two deductive analysis methods are used, the first a set of hypotheses are explored from participant responses, and second a qualitative technique to understand links in the short answer portion of the study. An additional inductive approach is used, consisting of a correlating approach to compare responses to questions and understand trends across the participants. Results from the analysis emphasize the current perceptions of innovation by the participants and opportunities to refine our search for better innovation practices. / text

Design-by-Analogy is a powerful tool to augment the traditional methods of concept generation and offers avenues to develop innovative and novel design solutions. Few tools exist to assist designers in systematically seeking and identifying analogies from within design repositories such as the United States Patent and Trademark Office patent database. A new tool for extracting functional analogies from patents has been developed to perform this task utilizing a Vector Space Model algorithm to quantitatively evaluate the functional similarity between design problems and patent descriptions of products. Initially, a Boolean Search approach was evaluated and several limitations were identified such as a lack of quantitative metrics for determining search result relevancy ranking as well as inadequate query mapping methods. Next, a Vector Space Model search tool was developed which includes extensive expansion of the Functional Basis using human-based term classification and automated document indexing techniques. The resulting functional patent controlled vocabulary consists of approximately 2,100 unique functions extracted from 65,000 randomly selected patents. The patent search database was generated by indexing 275,000 patents selected from the over 4 million patents available in digital form. A graphical user interface was developed to facilitate query vector generation, and the accompanying search result viewing interface provides data clustering and relevancy ranking. Two case studies are conducted to evaluate the efficacy of the search engine. The first case study successfully replicated the functional similarity results of a classic Design-by-Analogy problem of the guitar pickup winder. The second case study is an original design problem consisting of an automated window washer, and the results illustrate the range of analogically distant solutions that can be extracted ranging from very near-field, literal solutions to the far-field cross domain solutions. Finally, the search tool’s efficacy with regard to increasing quantity and novelty of ideas produced during Concept Generation is experimentally evaluated. The two factors evaluated are first whether analogies improved performance and second how the functionality level of the analogy impacted performance. The experimental results showed an increase in novelty for high functionality analogies compared with the control and other experimental groups. No statistically significant difference was found with regard to quantity of ideas generated. / text

Analogies play a well-noted role in innovative design. Analogical reasoning is central to the practices of design-by-analogy and bio-inspired design. In both, analogies are used to derive abstracted principles from prior examples to generate new design solutions. While numerous laboratory and classroom studies of analogy usage have been published, relatively few studies have systematically examined real-world design-by-analogy to describe its characteristics and impacts. To better teach design-by-analogy and develop support tools for engineers, specific insights are needed regarding, for example, what types of product advantages are gained through design-by-analogy and how different design process characteristics influence its outcomes. This research comprises two empirical product studies which investigate analogical inspiration in real-world design to inform the development of new analogy methods and tools. The first, an exploratory pilot study of 57 analogy-inspired products, introduces the product study method and applies several categorical variables to classify product examples. These variables measure aspects such as the composition of the design team, the driving approach to analogical reasoning, and the achieved benefits of using the analogy-inspired concept. The full scale study of 70 analogy-inspired products uses formal collection and screening methods and a refined set of classification variables to analyze examples. It adopts a cross-sectional approach, using statistical tests of association to detect relationships among variables. Combined, these surveys of real-world analogy-inspired innovation inform the development of analogy tools and provide a general account of distant analogy usage across engineering disciplines. The cross-sectional product study method demonstrated in this work introduces a valuable tool for investigating factors and impacts of real-world analogy usage in design.

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