| Design by analogy, in which designers draw inspiration from cross-domain design solutions, is a promising methodology for design practice. Although this methodology has the potential to be incredibly fruitful in the engineering product design process, there lacks a 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. |
