User requirements for analogical design support tools: Learning from practitioners of bio-inspired design

Date

2018-09-01

Author

Töre Yargın, Gülşen
Firth, Roxana Moroiranu
Crilly, Nathan

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

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When designers develop biologically-inspired design (BID) solutions, they are engaging in a process of analogical design. Software tools have been developed to support analogical design processes, presenting designers with information to help in the construction of useful analogies. However, the requirements for such tools have not been explicitly informed by accounts of practitioners' experiences. To address this, interviews were conducted with 14 expert practitioners in BID to understand how they find and apply cross-domain analogies. Three main themes emerged from the analysis: (1) the skill sets of individual practitioners; (2) the ways they work as part of an interdisciplinary team; and (3) their orientations to biology. These themes present opportunities and challenges for developing analogical design support tools. (C) 2017 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Subject Keywords

General Engineering, Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous), General Social Sciences, Artificial Intelligence, Architecture, Computer Science Applications, Biologically-inspired design, Creativity, Design practice, Design process, Innovation

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11511/42872

Collections

Department of Industrial Design, Article