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

Abstract

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.

Should we manage the process of inventing? Designing for patentability

“…Sill design theory formalism helps to guide reasoning and ensure inventive step and novelty of the emerging solutions. In their (Fu et al, 2015) propose patent-based functional analogy method which deals with these aspects of subjectivity. Patent mining techniques, patent mapping that aim to use meta data or information in the texts of patents by analyzing patent databases can substantially enrich patents analysis to create databases of actions and effects.…”

“…Patent mining techniques, patent mapping that aim to use meta data or information in the texts of patents by analyzing patent databases can substantially enrich patents analysis to create databases of actions and effects. For instance, it might be interesting to use C-K with design by analogy search engines to first, use the power of the design-by-analogy search engine (Fu et al, 2015) to analyze functions embedded in the patent databases and second, experiment with new strategies of generating nonobvious ideas using C-K design framework.…”

“…Design by analogy methods applied to patent texts (Fu et al, 2015, Jeong and Kim, 2014, Murphy et al, 2014 attempted to be used for patents creation by assuming that similar problems can appear in technologies that have similar functions and properties (Table 1).…”

“…Design-by-analogy extracts functional analogies from patent databases and allows designers to find analogies with the existing patents (Fu et al, 2015). As the authors underline, this method quantifies the functional similarity between the design problem and patent description and this, lead to generate new concepts using design-by-analogy.…”

The Analysis and Presentation of Patents to Support Engineering Design

“…Similar to functional hierarchical trees generated by Cascini and Zini [49] to search for patent similarity, Fu et al [50] presented the results of testing a method for extracting functional analogies based on functional vector space representation [51] from patent databases to assist designers in systematically seeking and identifying analogies. The work extracted vocabulary of functions from a patent database, building on the hierarchical structure of a functional basis [52].…”