Impact of Underlying Design Motivations upon Design Analogies

DS 86: Proceedings of The Fourth International Conference on Design Creativity,Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA, USA

Year: 2016
Editor: Julie Linsey, Maria Yang, and Yukari Nagai
Author: Cameron, Turner; Malena, Agyemang
Series: ICDC
ISBN: 978-1-904670-82-7

Abstract

Investigations into the nature of engineering design analogies have indicated when represented through
the prism of a functional basis, differences can be attributed to similarity in functions, and to
architectural arrangements of these functions. During a design, there are always explicit design goals, but
there are also underlying design goals which may or may not be explicitly expressed, but occur as a result
of the resident design culture within an organization. This research is considering the question of if and
how these underlying design motivations affect the use of design analogies; both via the use or non-use
of analogies, but also by the types of analogies used, in particular with respect to architecture. This
preliminary research intends to lay the foundation for asking and answering these questions with the
ultimate goal of being able to identify design analogies that enhance the creativity of design solutions by
considering the intrinsic motivations of the design problem in the analogy search method.

Keywords: Functional Basis, Design Analogies, Design Motivations