Analogies to Succeed: Application to a Service Design Problem

This study aims to expand current understanding of ideation methods and its transferability
from product design domain to service design domain. It applies two Design-by-Analogy
(DbA) ideation methods (WordTree and SCAMPER) to a real service design problem in an
expert participants setting. Quantity and Novelty metric results are analysed along with design
fixation effects. Both DbA methods produced statistically significant larger number of novel
ideas when compared to the control. The number of novel ideas with SCAMPER method
doubled those generated via WordTree. Fixation effects were counterintuitive since
SCAMPER appears to be a method that promotes both fixation and de-fixation effects. These
findings suggest DbA ideation methods offer positive capabilities for assisting designers to
generate solutions for service design problems.