Insights into design concept similarity judgements

Similarity has been shown to influence various measures of outcome creativity in combinatorial design tasks, but the role of similarity during the combination of design concepts is unknown. As an initial step towards understanding design concept similarity we review prominent models of similarity processing, highlight challenges with adoption in a design context, and carry out an exploratory experimental investigation of design concept similarity perception. Similarity may be the result of structural alignment processing and similarity ratings appear to vary with the number of commonalities.