The research objective of this award is to improve understanding and capabilities in concept generation through design by analogy methods. The proposed approach, a collaboration between the disciplines of cognitive psychology, engineering design and computer science, is to provide new tools for design based on a representation that associates functional and geometric information, combining a linguistic search for functional similarity with a multi-level search for geometric similarity to automatically identify and present analogies to the designer. The initial application for the Verrocchio Project is the design of prosthetic and orthotic devices for persons with disabilities, a domain that is ripe for innovation. The initial search space is the USPTO utility patent repository. Deliverables will include: (1) means to more effectively generalize design problems through functional descriptions; (2) the ability to search for analogical solutions with alternative functional representations; (3) ways to search for geometric similarities across a set of functional analogies; and (4) the ability to produce a tractable set of analogies for use by the designer.
If successful, the results of this research will have five broad and transformative impacts. The first impact arises from the key product of the research: a method for systematically and automatically identifying analogies. This tool will have broad applicability across many product domains, and will improve the efficiency of the search for innovative products in those domains. Second, the research will advance the foundation for use of analogies in engineering design methods. Third, because the research will result in a computer implementation of the method, the work will add to the growing cyber infrastructure of the country. Fourth, the interdisciplinary nature of the research ensures cross-fertilization of theory and research techniques in each of the collaborators? disciplines. This interdisciplinarity will enhance the probability of broad adoption of the approach. Fifth, instructional materials will be developed for training students in the approach. These instructional materials will be freely available to instructors at other institutions, encouraging broader adoption of the approach.
Design by analogy, in which designers draw inspiration from cross-domain designsolutions, is a promising methodology for design practice. Although this methodology has the potential to be incredibly fruitful in the engineering product design process, there lacksa practical, efficient, procedural way to find these meaningful analogies. This work explores the effects of different types of analogical stimuli on design output quality of teams and individual engineering designers, to gain a better understanding of design by analogy from a cognitive perspective; then, attempts to leverage the existing design solutions within a repository, combined with an exploration of inherent structural forms that can be discovered based on the content and similarity of that data through data mining techniques, in order to gain useful insights into the nature of the design space. Discovering structural forms that describe a set of formally represented designs within a repository leads to insights regarding their interrelatedness that have the potential to be meaningful to engineering designers through analogical inspiration. In this work, the approach is applied to uncover structure in the U.S. patent database. This exploration of structures is performed in a number of different ways, including comparing the structures to human organization of patents, examining different types of structures and their implications regarding the similarity among patents, and exploring function-based structures vs. surface-content-based structures, among others.These insights could generate fodder for stimulating design by engineering designers, which was tested in this dissertation through a cognitive engineering design study. With a way to extract the interrelatedness and interconnectedness of patents in the space, designers might be able to strategically choose which cross-domain designs to expose themselves to, or even traverse the space in a more intentional and meaningful exploratory way. By allowing for more efficient and insightful access to external analogical stimuli, this approach might enable designers have the potential to create more innovative design solutions.
