Analogies from Function, Flow and Performance Metrics

The process of engineering design involves moving through different levels of abstraction of the design problem and solution. During this cycle, the use of analogies has been shown to be a powerful mechanism for the development of a design solution. These design analogies are often drawn from systems that embody a similar function-flow-performance metric combination. Yet, most existing design tools focus not on these abstract representations, but instead focus on functional, linguistic descriptions of the systems. This paper focuses on several significant concepts that are essential to the exploitation of function-flow-performance based comparisons of design analogies.