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