"Discovering and Exploring Structure in Design Databases and Its Role in Stimulating Design-by-Analogy"

Dr. Katherine Fu
Assistant Professor
Mechanical Engineering and Industrial Design
Georgia Institute of Technology
 

Design by analogy, in which designers draw inspiration from cross-domain design solutions, is a promising methodology for design practice. Although this methodology has the potential to be incredibly fruitful in the engineering product design process, there lacks a practical, efficient, procedural way to find these meaningful analogies. With this work, we attempt to leverage the existing design solutions within a design repository (the US Patent Database), combined with an exploration of inherent structural forms that can be discovered based on the content and similarity of that data through data mining techniques, in order to gain useful insights into the nature of the design space. Discovering inherent structural forms that describe a set of formally represented designs within a repository will lead to insights regarding the interrelatedness and interconnectedness of patents in the space, potentially enabling designers to strategically choose which cross-domain designs to expose themselves to, or even traverse the space in a more intentional and meaningful exploratory way. By allowing for more efficient and insightful access to external analogical stimuli, designers have the potential to create more innovative design solutions.

Dr. Kate Fu is an Assistant Professor at Georgia Institute of Technology, with a joint appointment in Mechanical Engineering and Industrial Design. Prior to this appointment, she has been a Postdoctoral Fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD). She completed her Ph.D. and M.S. in Mechanical Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University, and her B.S. in Mechanical Engineering from Brown University. Her work has focused on studying the engineering design process through cognitive studies, and extending those findings to the development of methods and tools to facilitate more effective and inspired design and innovation.

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