<p>Function drives many early design considerations in product development. Therefore, when searching for sources of inspiration or evaluating designs against existing technology, finding functionally similar examples is important. However, it is difficult to capture how people consider products to be functionally similar and therefore, if quantitative measures that compare function directly from the products themselves are meaningful. In this work, human perception of functional similarity is considered at two levels of abstraction: (1) the high-level purpose of a product, and (2) a detailed view of how the product works. The human understanding of functional similarity is quantified by crowdsourcing triplet ratings and mapping them to a 2D embedding space. From these embedding spaces, relative similarities are calculated and compared to mathematical measures that can be applied to functional representations of products. By making these comparisons, we shed light on how quantitative measures align with human perceptions of functional similarity. In doing so, we also demonstrate how different levels of abstraction and the fuzzy line between what is considered ``similar enough'' may impact how these measures are utilized. Overall, this work adds to the understanding of product similarity and how it can be leveraged in a way that is consequential to designers. Thus, the results have direct applications in creativity support tools, such as those used for design-by-analogy, or for future computational methods in design.</p>

Aligning Human and Computational Evaluations of Functional Design Similarity

Paper Proceedings: https://asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/IDETC-CIE/IDETC-CIE2021/volume/85369

ASME 2021 International Design Engineering Technical Conferences & Computers and Information in Engineering Conference (IDETC/CIE2021)

Supporting the need among researchers worldwide for additional online and multimedia content, ASME now offers the ASME Conference Video Collection. This platform will collect and provide long-term access to conference presentation videos, encompassing all technology areas within ASME's technical conference and events program. About 30,000-40,000 engineers across all mechanical engineering and related disciplines participate in ASME conferences each year. This includes authors of approximately 6,000 to 8,000 technical papers published by ASME, the majority of whom also submit video presentations for our virtual conferences. The video collection will be available as an add-on to existing product packages or as a separate subscription.