SOLVING ILL-DEFINED PROBLEMS WITH ANALOGY:  THE EFFECT OF VISUAL AND NON-VISUAL SOURCE STIMULI ON IDEA GENERATION

Meaghan Beever

This study set out to explore analogical reasoning in a design-specific context. The literature on analogical problem-solving, while extensive, gives little attention to differences between well-defined and ill-defined problem-solving and the resulting implications for analogy use. An in-depth comparison of design and cognitive psychology research was conducted in order to clarify the relationship between ill-defined problems and analogical problem-solving. The analysis revealed key characteristics that differentiate designers' use of analogy from that of problem solvers in other contexts. Specifically, designers make effective use of more than just structural-level cues when mapping analogies, they engage analogical reasoning as a way to generate new target scenarios, and they use analogy intuitively and spontaneously. Serving as an additional driving force for the project was an interest in the effect of perceptually distant analogies on idea generation. An empirical investigation was developed to examine the relationship between an analogy source's mode of representation and how the source is mapped and transferred during design problem-solving. Seventy-two architecture and interior design students were asked to generate ideas for solving a spatial design problem using a variety of analogy prompts that represented a range of increasingly distant perceptual modes: visual (images), auditory (music), and a hybrid visual/auditory mode (text). Participants' responses were coded, categorized and counted in a content analysis directed at clarifying the impact of cross-modal analogies on the emergence of design ideas. Results of the study indicate analogies are mapped across a range of dimensions that include feature-level, structure-level, function-level, affect-level and place-level cues, and the degree to which they are used appears to be related to the perceptual mode of the source. Further analysis revealed a predominance of ideas for non-visual sources in an adaptation stage of analogical reasoning. Discoveries from this research point to an emerging model of analogical problem-solving. This model should address the drivers specific to ill-defined problems that act upon analogy in a design context as well as the addition of an adaptation step in the analogical reasoning process, particularly in cases where the analogy must link a source and target that are represented in different perceptual modes.

SOLVING ILL-DEFINED PROBLEMS WITH ANALOGY: THE EFFECT OF VISUAL AND NON-VISUAL SOURCE STIMULI ON IDEA GENERATION

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