Design by Analogy: A Study of the WordTree Method for Problem Re-Representation

Linsey, Julie; Markman, Arthur B.; Wood, Kristin L.

doi:10.1115/1.4006145

Cited by 161 publications

(128 citation statements)

References 44 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

127

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…All the participants solved a "peanut sheller" design problem, which was employed successfully in many prior studies (for example: (Linsey et al, 2011;Linsey et al, 2012)). This problem asked participants to generate as many ideas as possible for a device that could quickly and efficiently shell peanuts without the use of electricity and with a minimum damage to the peanuts.…”

Section: Design Problemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Examining design fixation in engineering idea generation: the role of example modality

Viswanathan

Linsey

2013

International Journal of Design Creativity and Innovation

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Design fixation is a major concern in engineering idea generation because it restricts the solution space in which designers search for their ideas. For designers to be more creative, it is essential to mitigate their fixation. The majority of studies in the literature investigate the role of pictorial stimuli in design fixation; however, the role of examples presented in other formats, including physical prototypes, is largely unknown. This paper presents a study that compares design fixation, in novice designers, caused by pictorial and physical representations. The effects of defixating materials proposed by Linsey et al (2010) are also investigated. The results show that physical formats cause a higher magnitude of fixation compared to pictorial form; however, participants utilizing physical examples produce a greater quantity of non-redundant ideas.Consistent with prior studies, the results also indicate that the defixation materials may not facilitate mitigation of novice designers' fixation.

show abstract

Section: Design Problemmentioning

confidence: 99%

Examining design fixation in engineering idea generation: the role of example modality

Viswanathan

Linsey

2013

International Journal of Design Creativity and Innovation

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…On the design-by-analogy front, Linsey et al (2012), Segers et al (2005), and Verhaegen et al (2011) develop approaches to analogical retrieval and reasoning through linguistic (semantic word) associations, problem re-representation, and mappings. Shai and Reich (Reich and Shai 2012;Shai and Reich 2004) developed approaches to analogical retrieval of knowledge structures and processes that allow the use of across domains.…”

Section: Design-by-analogymentioning

confidence: 99%

Design-by-analogy: experimental evaluation of a functional analogy search methodology for concept generation improvement

Murphy

Yang

et al. 2014

Res Eng Design

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Design-by-analogy is a growing field of study and practice, due to its power to augment and extend traditional concept generation methods by expanding the set of generated ideas using similarity relationships from solutions to analogous problems. This paper presents the results of experimentally testing a new method for extracting functional analogies from general data sources, such as patent databases, to assist designers in systematically seeking and identifying analogies. In summary, the approach produces significantly improved results on the novelty of solutions generated and no significant change in the total quantity of solutions generated. Computationally, this design-by-analogy facilitation methodology uses a novel functional vector space representation to quantify the functional similarity between represented design problems and, in this case, patent descriptions of products. The mapping of the patents into the functional analogous words enables the generation of functionally relevant novel ideas that can be customized in various ways. Overall, this approach provides functionally relevant novel sources of design-byanalogy inspiration to designers and design teams.

show abstract

“…In the WordTree method, key functional requirements and customer needs are identified and synonyms of these words are then linguistically re-represented in a visual diagram known as a WordTree 6 ..The WordTree is formed through a combination of rotational brainwriting and utilization of the online WordNet database (http://wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn ) to identify additional hypernyms (more general synonyms) and troponyms (more specific synonyms). The WordTree method begins by identifying key problem descriptors from customer needs, a mission statement, and/or functional models.…”

Section: Background: Formal Design-by-analogymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Navigating through different hypernyms and troponyms, and their related hypernyms or troponyms results in a tree-like hierarchy with words on the same "branch" having higher similarity than words on different "branches". During this phase, hypernyms and troponyms that are unusual or unfamiliar are specifically sought since they are typically associated with very domain specific verbs in distant but analogous domains 6 . An example of a completed WordTree for the verb "hold" can be found in Figure 3.…”

Section: Background: Formal Design-by-analogymentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Analogy Seeded Mind-Maps: A Simple and Quick Design-by-Analogy Method

Marshall¹,

Crawford²,

Jensen³

2015 ASEE Annual Conference and Exposition Proceedings

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

design and geometry modeling for design. Dr. Crawford's research interests span topics in computeraided mechanical design and design theory and methodology. Dr. Crawford is co-founder of the DTEACh program, a "Design Technology" program for K-12, and is active on the faculty of the UTeachEngineering program that seeks to educate teachers of high school engineering. Recent research has investigated methods based on design-by-analogy meant to enhance concept generation. While these methods are promising, they can be cumbersome and difficult to apply in engineering classrooms. This paper presents Analogy Seeded Mind-Maps, a new method to prompt generation of analogous solution principles drawn from multiple analogical domains. The method begins with identifying a primary functional design requirement such as "eject part." We then use this functional requirement "seed" to generate a WordTree, which is a graph of grammatically analogical synonyms. We randomly select a set of 10-15 words from each WordTree list and use the resulting word list to populate the first-level nodes of a mind-map, with the functional requirement seed as the central hub. The word list and resulting mind-map then serve as visual tools that are utilized during the concept generation process. The effectiveness of the tool in generating concepts has been evaluated in separate studies utilizing student design teams working on a wide variety of projects in both the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA), a small academic community, and at The University of Texas at Austin, a large public research university setting. In our evaluation of the method, designers first used the word list (10-15 words from WordTree) to individually generate solutions and then performed team concept generation using the analogically seeded mind-map. The total quantity of concepts was measured. Additionally, the effect of word familiarity and the number of definitions of word were investigated for their effect on the quantity of concepts generated. It was found that the Analogy Seeded Mind-Map method allowed students to generate a large number of concepts in a relatively short amount of time with only brief introduction and explanation of the method. Introduction and MotivationInnovation is often a primary goal during the engineering design process. Various concept generation techniques exist to help designers develop innovative solutions. Techniques such as Brainstorming, 6-3-5/C-sketch and TRIZ 8 , are widely used in the engineering classroom environment. Brainstorming and 6-3-5/C-sketch require the designer to spontaneously generate ideas, but also allow for inspiration from ideas of other participants. TRIZ, on the other hand, provides a more guided approach to solving engineering problems based on addressing conflicts between competing performance parameters. One area of recent interest in concept generation research is the phenomenon of design-by-analogy. The invention of Velcro ® is one of the most popular anecdotes citing the spontaneous use of analogy to solve an...

show abstract

Design by Analogy: A Study of the WordTree Method for Problem Re-Representation

Cited by 161 publications

References 44 publications

Examining design fixation in engineering idea generation: the role of example modality

Examining design fixation in engineering idea generation: the role of example modality

Design-by-analogy: experimental evaluation of a functional analogy search methodology for concept generation improvement

Analogy Seeded Mind-Maps: A Simple and Quick Design-by-Analogy Method

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About