NordDesign 2014 August 27 – 29, 2014 Espoo, Finland / Melbourne, Australia DRAFT- Analogies to Succeed: Applications to Service Design Problems Diana P. Moreno 1 , Maria C. Yang 2 , Lucienne Blessing 3 , and Kristin L. Wood 4 1 Massachusetts Institute of Technology dmoreno@mit.edu 2 Massachusetts Institute of Technology mcyang@mit.edu 3 University of Luxembourg lucienne.blessing@uni.lu 4 Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD) kristinwood@sutd.edu.sg Abstract This study aims to expand current understanding of ideation methods and its transferability from the physical domain (product) to the transactional domain (service). It evaluates the impact of two Design-by-Analogy (DbA) ideation methods (WordTree and SCAMPER) in both, creativity and design fixation management when solving transactional design problems. These results are contrasted with the performance of a non-assisted control scenario. Both DbA methods produced a statistically significant larger number of novel ideas when compared to the control. The SCAMPER method contributes with a large portion of total novel ideas. Counterintuitive results were found for fixation since SCAMPER appears to be a method that promotes both fixation and de-fixation outcomes. Keywords: Design-by-Analogy, Design Methods, Creativity, Design fixation 1 Introduction This study explores the impact of two Design-by-Analogy (DbA) approaches, SCAMPER and the WordTree method, on creativity and design fixation when solving transactional design problems. These results are contrasted with the performance of a non-assisted control scenario. 1.1 Analogies in cognition Analogy is the association of a situation from one domain (source) to another (target) that is possible due to similarity relations or the mapping of representations [1]. Previous studies show a solid relationship between analogical reasoning and the cognitive processes associated with linguistics and semantic memory retrieval [2, 3]. 1.2 Semantic memory retrieval Semantic memory refers to the organization of information in the human mind. It is usually represented as a network of concepts (nodes) that are linked through categories [4, 5, 6]. From