The importance of retrieval in creative design analogies

Analogy is an important reasoning process in creative design. It enables the generation of new design artifacts using ideas from semantically distant domains. Candidate selection is a crucial process in the generation of creative analogies. Without a good set of candidate sources, the success of subsequent phases can be compromised. Two main types of selection have been identified: semantics-based retrieval and structure-based retrieval. This paper presents an empirical study on the importance of the analogy retrieval strategy in the domain of software design. We argue that both types of selection are important, but they play different roles in the process.