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Creating Analogies for Design Problem-Solving: Initial Evaluation of an Engineering Faculty Workshop
... Below is an example of how this process of TAR can be implemented. We took this example from a team of participants in an in-person workshop for engineering faculty which the first author conducted during summer 2022 (Lavi et al., 2023). ...
Scholars and international bodies have highlighted the need to foster undergraduate engineering students’ creative thinking and critical thinking. Case-based learning is a name for a host of pedagogical approaches which are student-centered, requiring the instructor to act as an expert guide rather than as a source of knowledge. These approaches make use of cases, thus contextualizing learning of discipline or practice-specific knowledge. This approach can help facilitate students’ development of conceptual understanding and thinking skills, as students work through and reflect on the process of solving cases. Despite the learning benefits of case-based learning, it has not often been implemented in undergraduate engineering education when compared with project- or problem-based learning. This paper outlines our proposal for a case-based learning pedagogical framework which aims to foster undergraduate engineering students’ creative and critical thinking. The framework provides scaffolding of the learning process for students using a sequence of case-based learning implementations with varying levels of student autonomy. We begin by providing a theoretical background on problem-solving in engineering, creative thinking, and critical thinking, followed by a review of case-based learning in undergraduate engineering education. Next, we outline our proposed pedagogical framework, including guidelines for instructional design and implementation, as well as practical examples. We then discuss the contributions and limitations of our work. Finally, we discuss potential challenges associated with the implementation of our framework and potential mitigations. This work offers theoretical and practical contributions for developing undergraduate engineering students’ creative and critical thinking.
The motivation behind this research is to aid designers in retrieving a large number of analogies relevant to the design problem under consideration. The objective of the work reported here is to automatically classify natural-language descriptions of analogies into constructs of SAPPhIRE model of causality – a common causal language that was developed for describing the functioning of natural and artificial systems. This should provide the benefit of utilizing the enormous data available on the Internet, while also providing focused search results. Using supervised classification approach, the accuracy (cross-validation) achieved in classification of natural-language descriptions of analogies into the constructs of SAPPhIRE model was 0.70 ± 0.08.
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-by-analogy inspiration to designers and design teams.
Although both the academic and the trade literature have widely acknowledged the need to foster the development of more-innovative products, little empirical research has examined the cognitive processes underlying the creation of these novel product concepts. In this research, three empirical studies examine how analogical thinking influences the idea-generation stage of the new product development process. The first study uses the verbal protocols of real-world industrial designers to trace the role of analogy in the context of a new product development task, and the second and third studies use an experimental approach to assess the effectiveness of different ideation strategies and conditions. Findings from these studies indicate that the originality of the resulting product design is influenced by the extent of analogical transfer, the type of analogies used, and the presence of external primes. In addition, these studies reveal a positive relationship between the originality of the product concept and consumers' willingness to pay for it, an important measure in the concept-testing phase of product development.
Design by analogy is a powerful part of the design process across the wide variety of modalities used by designers such as linguistic descriptions, sketches, and diagrams. We need tools to support people's ability to find and use analogies. A deeper understanding of the cognitive mechanisms underlying design and analogy is a crucial step in developing these tools. This paper presents an experiment that explores the effects of representation within the modality of sketching, the effects of functional models, and the retrieval and use of analogies. We find that the level of abstraction for the representation of prior knowledge and the representation of a current design problem both affect people's ability to retrieve and use analogous solutions. A general semantic description in memory facilitates retrieval of that prior knowledge. The ability to find and use an analogy is also facilitated by having an appropriate functional model of the problem. These studies result in a number of important implications for the development of tools to support design by analogy. Foremost among these implications is the ability to provide multiple representations of design problems by which designers may reason across, where the verb construct in the English language is a preferred mode for these representations.
Design activity occurs in many professions, ranging from technical to more artistic domains. Whatever the domain, it is a constant challenge for designers to introduce creativity in each design project they work on and minimize the tendency to repeat familiar design features. The goal of this paper is to present a cognitive approach to design problem solving as well as an experimental study. This study aims at determining whether creative ideas can be enhanced by the presentation of external sources of inspiration. In particular, we analyse the effect of the presentation of different kinds of sources (intra- versus interdomain sources, which are presented as graphical representations or as verbal labels) according to the designers’ level of expertise (lay-designers versus professionals). Results show that it is possible to enhance evocation processes in design, but that it is dependent on both the nature of sources of inspiration and the designers’ level of expertise. Based on these results, we suggest ways for enhancing creative ideas in design tasks.
Analogy has been the focus of extensive research in cognitive science over the past two decades. Through analogy, novel situations and problems can be understood in terms of familiar ones. Indeed, a case can be made for analogical processing as the very core of cognition. This is the first book to span the full range of disciplines concerned with analogy. Its contributors represent cognitive, developmental, and comparative psychology; neuroscience; artificial intelligence; linguistics; and philosophy.
The book is divided into three parts. The first part describes computational models of analogy as well as their relation to computational models of other cognitive processes. The second part addresses the role of analogy in a wide range of cognitive tasks, such as forming complex cognitive structures, conveying emotion, making decisions, and solving problems. The third part looks at the development of analogy in children and the possible use of analogy in nonhuman primates.
Contributors Miriam Bassok, Consuelo B. Boronat, Brian Bowdle, Fintan Costello, Kevin Dunbar, Gilles Fauconnier, Kenneth D. Forbus, Dedre Gentner, Usha Goswami, Brett Gray, Graeme S. Halford, Douglas Hofstadter, Keith J. Holyoak, John E. Hummel, Mark T. Keane, Boicho N. Kokinov, Arthur B. Markman, C. Page Moreau, David L. Oden, Alexander A. Petrov, Steven Phillips, David Premack, Cameron Shelley, Paul Thagard, Roger K.R. Thompson, William H. Wilson, Phillip Wolff
Bradford Books imprint
Analogy—recalling familiar past situations to deal with novel ones—is a mental tool that everyone uses. Analogy can provide invaluable creative insights, but it can also lead to dangerous errors. In Mental Leaps two leading cognitive scientists show how analogy works and how it can be used most effectively. Keith Holyoak and Paul Thagard provide a unified, comprehensive account of the diverse operations and applications of analogy, including problem solving, decision making, explanation, and communication.
Holyoak and Thagard present their own theory of analogy, considering its implications for cognitive science in general, and survey examples from many other domains. These include animal cognition, developmental and social psychology, political science, philosophy, history of science, anthropology, and literature.
Understanding how we draw analogies is important for people interested in the evolution of thinking in animals and in children; for those whose focus is on either creative thinking or errors of everyday reasoning; for those concerned with how decisions are made in law, business, and politics; and for those striving to improve education. Mental Leaps covers all of this ground, emphasizing the principles that govern the use of analogy and keeping technical matters to a minimum.
Bradford Books imprint
Design fixation is a phenomenon with important significance to many fields of design due to the potential negative impacts it may have in design outcomes, especially during the ideation stage of the design process. The present study aims to provide a framework for understanding, or at least probing, design fixation by presenting a review of existing defixation approaches, as well as metrics that have been employed to understand and account for design fixation. This study also describes the results of two design by analogy (DbA) methods, WordTree and SCAMPER, to overcome design fixation in an experiment that involved 97 knowledge-domain experts. The study outcomes are at least twofold: a common framework of metrics and approaches to overcome design fixation in a wide range of design problems and nonintuitive results for DbA approaches in design fixation and other related creativity metrics. The application of WordTree and SCAMPER shows that both methods yield increased novelty compared to a control, where the SCAMPER results are significantly higher than WordTree. It is also found that WordTree mitigates design fixation whereas SCAMPER appears to be ineffective for this purpose but effective to generate an increased quantity of novel ideas. These results demonstrate that both DbA methods provide de-fixation capabilities and enhance designers’ creativity during idea generation.
Problem solving is generally regarded as the most important cognitive activity in everyday and professional contexts. Most
people are required to and rewarded for solving problems. However, learning to solve problems is too seldom required in formal
educational settings, in part, because our understanding of its processes is limited. Instructional-design research and theory
has devoted too little attention to the study of problem-solving processes. In this article, I describe differences among
problems in terms of their structuredness, domain specificity (abstractness), and complexity. Then, I briefly describe a variety
of individual differences (factors internal to the problem solver) that affect problem solving. Finally, I articulate a typology
of problems, each type of which engages different cognitive, affective, and conative processes and therefore necessitates
different instructional support. The purpose of this paper is to propose a metatheory of problem solving in order to initiate
dialogue and research rather than offering a definitive answer regarding its processes.
Analogies are ubiquitous in science, both in theory and experiments. Based on an ethnographic study of a research lab in neural engineering, we focus on a case of conceptual innovation where the cross-breeding of two types of analogies led to a breakthrough. ...
Most designs are modifications from previous products and lessons learned from earlier designs can be beneficial when developing new products. This paper introduces a support strategy for the conceptual design phase, which is based on connectivity models of past designs and allows designers to assess the risk of change spreading between components and facilitates a visual analysis of these change models. Based on the example of a new generation of diesel engine design, it will be shown how the ability to predict change propagation can guide designers through conceptual design allowing them to analyse design alternatives and foresee potential problems arising from the product architecture.
For the past several years the author has been reviewing instructional design theories in an attempt to identify prescriptive principles that are common to the various theries. This paper is a preliminary report of the principles that have been identified by this search. Five first principles are elaborated: (a) Learning is promoted when learners are engaged in solving real-world problems. (b) Learning is promoted when existing knowledge is activated as a foundation for new knowledge. (c) Learning is promoted when new knowledge is demonstrated to the learner. (d) Learning is promoted when new knowledge is applied by the learner. (e) Learning is promoted when new knowledge is integrated into the learner's world.
Representative instructional design theories are briefly examined to illustrate how they include these principles. These include: Star Legacy by the Vanderbilt Learning Technology Center, 4-Mat by McCarthy, instructional episodes by Andre, multiple approaches to understanding by Gardner, collaborative problem solving by Nelson, constructivist learning environments by Jonassen, and learning by doing by Schank.
It is concluded that, although they use a wide variety of terms, these theories and models do include fundamentally similar principles.
Can creativity be taught? An empirical study on benefits of visual analogy in basic design education
- E Çubukcu
- Ş G Dündar
E. Çubukcu and Ş. G. Dündar, "Can creativity be taught? An empirical
study on benefits of visual analogy in basic design education," A| Z ITU
Journal of the Faculty of Architecture, vol. 4, pp. 67-80, 2007.
Transfer of Learning From a Modern Multidisciplinary Perspective
- C R Wolfe
- V F Reyna
- C Brainerd
C. R. Wolfe, V. F. Reyna, and C. Brainerd, "Fuzzy-trace theory," Transfer
of Learning From a Modern Multidisciplinary Perspective," vol. 53, 2005.
Designby-analogy: Experimental evaluation of a functional analogy search methodology for concept generation improvement
- K Fu
- J Murphy
- M Yang
- K Otto
- D Jensen
- K Wood
K. Fu, J. Murphy, M. Yang, K. Otto, D. Jensen, and K. Wood, "Designby-analogy: Experimental evaluation of a functional analogy search
methodology for concept generation improvement," Research in
Engineering Design, vol. 26, pp. 77-95, 2015.