VISUAL ANALOGY AS A COGNITIVE STRATEGY IN THE ARCHITECTURAL DESIGN PROCESS: EXPERT VERSUS NOVICE PERFORMANCE.

This study examined the use of analogy in architectural design. Its main goal was to provide an understanding of how experts and novices alike used visual analog thinking to generate satisfactory solutions during their design process. A series of controlled experiments were conducted in order to examine how this cognitive strategy contributes to improving the resolution of design problems in each group of participants. Students and architects were asked to solve a set of unusual design problems. They were stimulated by exposure to visual images, and were given explicit instructions for using the analogy. The results showed that novices and experts were able to reason by visual analogy and used deep analogies. It was found out that the experts identified and recovered analogies from out-of-domain images. Novices, however, identified a large number of out-of-domain images, but recovered the analogies of out-of-domain and out-domain images to the same extent. Novices, unlike experts, did not add constraints to the initial design problem, but produced a large number of solutions. These results were found significant implications for the teaching of architectural projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]