Reasoning by visual analogy in design problem-solving: The role of guidance

The use of analogy, including visual analogy, is a powerful problem-solving strategy that can help explain new problems in terms of familiar ones. There is evidence that problem-solvers have difficulty in making spontaneous use of this strategy, despite its proven effectiveness. However, guidance to use it greatly increases accessibility to analogy in problem-solving. In the design domain, evidence of the use of analogy has hitherto been mostly anecdotal. Our goal in this paper is to show through empirical data that analogy can be effective in facilitating design problem-solving, especially when explicit instructions for its use are given.