Computational support for design-by-analogy (DbA) is a growing field, as it aids the process for designers looking to draw inspiration from external sources by harnessing the power of data mining and data visualization. This study presents a unique exploration-based approach for the analogical retrieval process using a computational tool called VISION (Visual Interaction tool for Seeking Inspiration based On Nonnegative Matrix Factorization). Leveraging the U.S. patent database as a source of inspiration, VISION enables designers to visualize a patent repository and explore for analogical inspiration in a user-driven manner. To achieve this, we perform hierarchical Nonnegative Matrix Factorization to generate a clustered structure of patent data and employ D3.js to visualize the patent structure in a node-link network, in which user interaction capabilities are enabled for data exploration. In this study, we also analyze the effect of data size (ranging from 100 to 3000 patents) on two performance aspects of VISION – the clustering quality of topic modeling results and the frame rate of interactive data visualization. The findings show that the tool exhibits more randomized and inconsistent topic modeling results when the database size is too small. But, increasing the database size lowers the frame rate to the point that it could diminish designers’ ability to retrieve and recall information. The scope of the work here is to present the creation of the DbA visualization tool called VISION and to evaluate its data scale limitations in order to provide a basis for developing a visual interaction tool for the analogical retrieval process during DbA.

中文翻译：

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一种基于探索的方法，使用 D3 进行计算支持的类比设计

对类比设计 (DbA) 的计算支持是一个不断发展的领域，因为它有助于设计师利用数据挖掘和数据可视化的力量从外部资源中汲取灵感。这项研究提出了一种独特的基于探索的方法，用于使用称为 VISION 的计算工具进行类比检索过程（五普通的一世交互工具小号寻找一世基于灵感○nñ负矩阵分解）。利用美国专利数据库作为灵感来源，VISION 使设计人员能够可视化专利存储库并以用户驱动的方式探索类似的灵感。为此，我们执行分层非负矩阵分解以生成专利数据的聚类结构，并使用 D3.js 在节点链接网络中可视化专利结构，其中启用了用户交互功能以进行数据探索。在这项研究中，我们还分析了数据大小（从 100 到 3000 项专利）对 VISION 的两个性能方面的影响——主题建模结果的聚类质量和交互式数据可视化的帧速率。研究结果表明，当数据库太小时，该工具表现出更多随机和不一致的主题建模结果。但是，增加数据库大小会降低帧速率，从而降低设计人员检索和调用信息的能力。这里的工作范围是展示名为 VISION 的 DbA 可视化工具的创建，并评估其数据规模限制，以便为开发用于 DbA 期间的类比检索过程的可视交互工具提供基础。