Shape Based Reminding as an Aid to Creative Design

This paper describes “Drawing Analogiesi, a shape based reminding program that uses freehand sketches to index and retrieve visual references for creative designing. Architects often employ reference images from books, magazines, and other visual collections to find forms they can adopt and adapt into their designs. We give examples of how designers use drawing and analogies and describe our approach to finding similar drawings. We argue that a graphical reminding scheme based on sketching can help designers find interesting references from various domains