Interpretation of Design Drawings by Analogy

Visual analogical mapping and transfer can be used to de-rive a structural model of a drawing by analogy, and, more-over, the problem of analogical mapping can be guided by using functional knowledge. We view the interpretation drawings of designs as deriving a structural model of the components and connections of the depicted device. This problem is not deductive in nature but, rather, it is abduc-tive, as there is no a priori reason a shape must represent one object and not another; only with significant help from the design context can a model be derived, and in particu-lar we propose to do it by deriving the model by analogy to a similar drawing with a known structural and teleological model. This requires (1) an analogical mapping from the source (known) drawing to the target drawing that is derived on the basis of shapes and spatial relations, and (2) a transfe