Analogy Mining for Specific Design Needs

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel analogical search engine that helps designers find distant yet relevant inspirations tailored to specific design needs, addressing the challenge of matching inspirations across multiple dimensions.

Contribution

It presents a new system for expressing and abstracting specific design needs to improve targeted analogical search relevance.

Findings

Returns more distant relevant inspirations than existing methods

Enables expression of specific design needs for tailored searches

Improves relevance of analogical matches in design exploration

Abstract

Finding analogical inspirations in distant domains is a powerful way of solving problems. However, as the number of inspirations that could be matched and the dimensions on which that matching could occur grow, it becomes challenging for designers to find inspirations relevant to their needs. Furthermore, designers are often interested in exploring specific aspects of a product-- for example, one designer might be interested in improving the brewing capability of an outdoor coffee maker, while another might wish to optimize for portability. In this paper we introduce a novel system for targeting analogical search for specific needs. Specifically, we contribute a novel analogical search engine for expressing and abstracting specific design needs that returns more distant yet relevant inspirations than alternate approaches.