TESTING DESIGN STIMULI FOR DESIGN-BY-ANALOGY ON A LARGE SET OF DESIGNERS

This paper presents evidence supporting the hypothesis that, for designers not specifically trained in designing-by-analogy, the sources of inspiration that share the same (sub-functions) and context of the target system lead to ideas having higher novelty and quality. The exploration of the design space gets positively affected as well. These evidence emerge after the statistical analysis of the results of an experiment that involved 84 graduate students in Mechanical Engineering, with typical competencies on engineering design, but without any specific skill on analogy-based idea generation.