Parallel structures

The power of analogy for truly original design.

Hello friends,

Like I’m sure many of you, the war in Ukraine has been a constant worry and presence in my thoughts. Things that previously felt like ~big deals~ have suddenly felt silly or insignificant.

What is the point of small-c creation in the face of capital-D destruction?

I learned something last year that helped then, and that I keep returning to now. Monet painted his “Water Lilies” series during World War 1, with the war at his doorstop. The front was only 30 miles away and he could hear gunshots while he painted. Both his son and his stepson were in the army.

In 1914, he wrote: “Yesterday I resumed work. It’s the best way to avoid thinking in these sad times. All the same I feel ashamed to think about my little researches into form and color while so many people are suffering and dying for us.”

Creating can help us in difficult times. Perhaps that’s why we’re drawn to it to regain a sense of autonomy and competence when the world feels uncontrollable.

So today let’s talk about creation. And creative solutions. The world always needs more of them.

Distant connections as a source of creativity

When developing new products, designers and engineers often draw on solutions from distant domains. Let’s look at a few examples of this kind of cross-domain innovation.

Rail workers’ jackets get dirty from grease, graphite, and dirt. As they get soiled, jackets become less reflective, less visible, and, consequently, less safe for workers. Lotus flowers self-clean. Drawing on this unique lotus effect, the materials science company W.L. Gore developed a new jacket surface that releases soil. The jacket has since been adapted by most rail companies in Europe.

Skis vibrate at high speeds. A grid layer in violins can help reduce their vibrations. Building on this idea, an acoustician helped Fischer Sport develop a similar grid to control ski vibrations. Now people hurtling down mountains at high speeds can have a smoother ride.

When people are learning to sew, they often find it hard to regulate the speed of the sewing machine. This leads to uneven stitches. Sensors used in computer mice regulate their speed to prevent rapid jumps across the screen. Bernina, a sewing machine company, adapted a similar solution to measure and regulate sewing machine speed with sensors. The outcome: even stitches, even for beginners.

So those are some real-life examples, but how do these types of distant analogies find their way into a product during the design process?

Designers in the lab

One observational study took designers into the lab to find out.

Eight product designers were recruited from various industrial design companies. This wasn’t their first (product) rodeo. On average, they each had around 17 years of design experience.

The designers were split into four pairs and each pair was asked to design a new product together. To make sure the task resembled what the designers might be doing in the wild, it was important for the product to fill a real unmet need. And that need, likely still unmet, is that it’s hard to eat while driving.

In more highfalutin terms: the problem of “automotive dining”. The target consumers: business professionals who make long commutes into the workplace and want to eat on the road. Perhaps it’s a population and problem that’s less relevant today given that many people are working remotely.

The pairs were given the problem statement and asked to design a product to solve it that was “practical and effective, safe to use, reusable, portable, and easy to assemble and use”. They received paper and pencils to make sketches and were given an hour to come up with their best idea. After the hour was up, they turned in a sketch of their solution.

Design, stage by stage

The design sessions were recorded and coded. While the final products of each pair were quite different, all four groups progressed through the same phases of the design process in roughly the same order:

1. Understanding and framing the problem. To start, the pairs defined the problem, what the required function was, and what to focus on.

2. Identifying and developing ideas. This phase was dynamic, switching between generating ideas, modifying them, clarifying them, and evaluating.

3. Deciding. The groups clarified and modified their ideas to reach a final decision.

Analogies were most prominent in the second phase (identifying and developing ideas), appearing around a quarter of the way through the 1-hour design session. The analogies themselves were diverse and included an oxygen mask (“It could be like an airplane oxygen mask”), a dentist’s swing light, bean bags, a lid for a cup (“Maybe it’s like a plastic lid for a cup”), and a superabsorbent cloth.

These loose connections were the seeds of ideas that were developed further. After idea generation through analogy, next came idea generation through assembling mechanical design elements (now how do we make this thing work?). Each of four designer pairs developed their final proposal from an initial idea generated in the form of an analogy.

To judge the quality of the final product designs, researchers brought in the kind of people who’d actually use the products – commuters. Nineteen commuter judges rated how original each pair’s final design was.

And it turns out, thinking about analogies more helped. Design pairs that spent more of their time generating ideas in the form of analogies came up with more original final designs.

Some is good, so is more better?

If more original designs arise from more time spent thinking through analogies, could encouraging people to make more analogies result in more original designs?

For that we need a causal study.

In a second experiment, 106 undergrad engineering students were given the same prompt as the profesh designers but with varied instructions to get them to use analogies and/or examples to help them come up with ideas.

There were five conditions in total. In a control condition, people received no explicit instruction.

One of the variables manipulated was how many analogies people were encouraged to come up with to solve the problem. In two conditions, people were encouraged to draw on one analogy, and in two conditions, people were encouraged to draw on as many analogies as they could. They were told: “Think of [one existing product / as many different types of products] that this new product or its components could look like or work like”.

A second variable that was manipulated was whether a prime – a concrete example – was given to people to help them get started. In two conditions, people saw a sketch of a drive-in window food tray as an example that could be useful in solving the design problem. In two conditions, people didn’t get a starting example.

These two variables were combined to form four experimental conditions. For example, someone might be encouraged to come up with multiple analogies and receive an example prime to get them started.

There were two key measures for each design – originality and value. Three senior product designers served as experts who rated how original each of the final designs were. Four potential customers, who were regular commuters, rated how much they’d be willing to pay for each of the designs, on a scale from $10 to $150.

One experimental condition was king when it came to producing original designs: imagination roamed when people were encouraged to come up with as many analogies as they could and were not given a prime to get them started.

Receiving a concrete example constrained the originality of people’s designs, dropping down to the same level as those who weren’t explicitly encouraged to use many analogies.

Image source, annotations added. People came up with the most original designs when encouraged to make use of many analogies (multiple bases) and not given a concrete example (no prime).

Being original can also translate to big bucks.

In line with the originality findings, people who were encouraged to come up with multiple analogies and didn’t receive a starting example came up with the most valuable designs. Commuters were willing to pay the most for these designs -- $63.10 on average. Those people who had been given a concrete starting example and were encouraged to only come up with one analogy developed the least valuable designs, worth only $33.26 to commuters.

An unintended consequence of seeing a concrete example was also unconscious plagiarism. Each design was rated for how tray-like it was since the example shown was a drive-in window tray. And what do you know, people who had been given this concrete example came up with more tray-like final designs.

Image source, annotations added. People who saw a concrete example of a drive-in window tray before coming up with their own designs ended up designing more tray-like solutions.

From research to practice

Are you developing a new product or trying to get creative? Some thoughts on how to apply these research findings to come up with more original and valuable ideas:

• Let imagination roam. Set aside time to come up with as many examples as possible to draw on for inspiration. More time spent generating analogies is related to more original outcomes.

• Distant connections are good! Real life innovation is full of examples of solutions based on far analogies. How is a ski like a violin or a jacket like a flower? These loose links can lead to creative leaps.

• Grow the best analogies into solutions. This seems to be a natural part of the design process – first to come up with a bunch of possible analogies and then to develop the best of the best into a final design.

• Don’t look at close competitors early in the process. The outcome will probably be less creative, and you’ll suffer from unconscious plagiarism. We can’t help but draw on concrete examples that we’ve seen. This runs against advice to start designing with benchmarking—examining competitors in detail. It’s a fine balance since you likely want to build on existing mental models and familiar patterns. But if you look at concrete solutions that are similar early on, you probably won’t be able to shake them.

• Benchmark and adapt elements from competitors later in the process, after an initial open thinking period. Once you have a new original solution, go for it! Make it better by examining competitors and adding or adapting elements that can improve usability.

A process to capture and develop wide-ranging ideas can help push us whether we’re working on small-c or capital-C creation.