Supporting Designers in Generating Novel Ideas at the Conceptual Stage Using Analogies from the Biological Domain
Sonal Keshwani · 2019
The aim of this research is to support designers in novel idea generation using design-by-analogy method, in particular, by using analogies from the biological domain. The motivation behind this research is to aid designers in creating more novel products that in turn would positively influence the market share of companies producing those products. In recent years, biological analogies have been extensively utilized by researchers and designers for product development. Also, previous studies have shown that design methods influence novelty. Therefore, the first empirical study of this research was conducted to understand how biological analogies compare with the other design methods in terms of novel idea generation. This study compared the influence of using biological analogies (in the form of biocards) with brainstorming – a substantially popular design method for novel idea generation. The results showed that using biocards over brainstorming led to an incremental increase in novelty of concepts; however, novelty leaps were not observed. This study pointed to the need for addressing the factors associated to biological analogies, which in turn would support designers to produce novel designs using these analogies. Three such factors, which influence novelty in both biologically inspired design and design-by-analogy methods, were identified and studied in this research. These factors were the following: a) conceptual-distance between the source-and the target-domain of an analogy; b) level of comprehensiveness at which an analogy is explained; and c) retrieval of analogy. The second empirical study was conducted to understand the influence, on novelty, of the factors (a) and (b) above. In factor (a), the source-domain is the domain from where the analogy is drawn, and the target-domain is the domain to which the analogy is applied. We defined ‘distance between the source-and the target-domain’ as the conceptual closeness between these two domains, on the basis of which analogies were systematically classified as biological-domain, cross-domain or in-domain analogies. In factor (b), we defined ‘level of comprehensiveness in explanation of an analogy’ as the relative depth at which an analogy is explained, on the basis of which explanations of analogies were systematically varied as surface, shallow (both shallow and surface are less comprehensive) or deep (more comprehensive). The major findings from the study were the following: (1) the analogies from biological-domain produced significantly greater novelty in designs over analogies from cross-and in-domain for less comprehensive explanations; the analogies from cross-domain and biological domains had no significant difference in novelty in designs for more comprehensive explanations; (2) levels of comprehensiveness in explanation of an analogy influences novelty. While the finding (1) indicates the need of a support to enable the designers in retrieving analogies from specific analogical domains - as also identified in the factor (c) above, the finding …