Spontaneous Analogising in Engineering Design: A Comparative Analysis of Experts and Novices

Analogical reasoning is claimed to play a central role in creative cognition and the development of expertise. To date, however, few studies have explored the nature and prevalence of spontaneous analogising in design contexts. In the present paper we report an experimental comparison of analogy use by expert and novice engineering designers who were presented with a brief to design a conceptual solution for an automated rent-a-car facility. Concurrent think-aloud protocols were elicited and analysed to derive measures of the rate of participants’ schema-driven analogising (defined as the recognition-primed application of abstract experiential knowledge that could afford a design solution to a familiar problem type), and participants’ case-driven analogising (defined as the invocation of a concrete prior design problem whose solution elements could be explicitly mapped onto the current problem). Results supported our central prediction that expert designers would demonstrate more schema-driven than case-driven analogising, whilst novices would show the reverse pattern of analogy use. We discuss the implications of these results for theories of design cognition and expert design practice.