Elsevier

Design Studies

Volume 36, January 2015, Pages 3-30
Design Studies

Behavioral analysis of analogical reasoning in design: Differences among designers with different expertise levels

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.destud.2014.07.001Get rights and content

Highlights

  • •

    We investigate differences among designers during analogical reasoning.

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    Data analysis was processed by The Observer XT.

  • •

    Expertise levels and selection reasons are significantly related.

  • •

    Frequency and duration of design behaviors among participants are different.

This paper explores the impacts of the expertise level of designers during analogical reasoning. In study 1, participants were asked to select source examples and explain their selections. It was found that experts were more likely to consider Experience and Esthetics as reasons for their selections. Third-year students were more inclined to draw inspiration from Symbolism, whereas first-year students considered more about Function. Another group of participants took part in study 2, performing analogical design. The behaviors of participants during design process were coded and the behavioral frequencies as well as durations were analyzed. We conclude that experts and third-year students pay more attention to the completeness of the design, while first-year students put more efforts on the functionality of design.

Section snippets

Visual analogy

Analogical reasoning can occur with pictures, words, and sentence clues (Malaga, 2000, Schwert, 2007, Smith et al., 1993). Because visual features frequently assist designers more than other forms (Bilda et al., 2006, Goldschmidt and Smolkov, 2006), visual analogies are largely employed by designers to solve design problems. Anecdotal examples of master architects, e.g., Le Corbusier, successfully using visual analogies to build notable architectures illustrates that establishing mappings via

Hypotheses

This study attempted to verify and further develop a similar investigation by Ozkan and Dogan (2013), who discovered that the expertise level significantly impacted the selection of source categories and the type of similarity established between source and target. In this study, observations were carried out concerning the field of product design for outdoor furniture. First-year and third-year design students without experience in outdoor furniture design and designers with 2–8 years of

Study 1

The experiment was devised to test Hypothesis 1 & 2. The images of source examples had three levels, as did the expertise levels of participants. Coding of the explanation for source example selections served as the dependent variables.

Participants

Study 2 was carried out in three groups: (a) 8 first-year design students (2 male, 6 female); (b) 8 third-year design students (5 male, 3 female); (c) 8 expert designers (7 male, 1 female). All participants had not engaged in study 1.

At the time this experiment was conducted, the exposure of first-year students to design methods was rare. They only had rough ideas of product design in mind. The third-year students had learned the basic process of product design. The expert designers had 2–8

Design examples

In this section we provide three examples of participants to illustrate how designers with different expertise level established relationship between source and target. These include one example for each group. The first example of an expert designer is included to illustrate that experts would pay more attention to the details and completeness of design solutions. They are capable of establishing structural similarities with source examples. The second example of a third-year student manifests

Conclusions

  • (1)

    The results of this research indicate that experts primarily choose near-source examples. Contrary to our prediction, students did not primarily choose distant source examples. The explanations of the source examples selection were significantly different among designers with different expertise levels. In addition to the main concern of Form, experts were significantly more likely to provide Experience and Esthetics as reasons for their selections compared with the other groups. Third-year

Limitation and future research

We readily acknowledge that the small scale of participants was likely to affect the result. This limitation requires particular caution in interpreting these findings, which cannot be generalized. Replicating this study on larger samples would be beneficial. Conversely, this new approach – the Observer XT – provides extensive useful information of different design performances. The visualization of these contents also provides a direct observation of the frequencies and durations of

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to acknowledge the support provided by the Public Welfare Technology Applied Research Projects of Zhejiang Province, China (No. 2014C33133), and Natural Science Fund Program of Zhejiang Province, China (No. LY13E050006). The authors would also like to thank Kangxiang Jiang, Yifei Huang, Ding Gao who have made valuable contributions to this study.

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