Idea Inspire 3.0—A Tool for Analogical Design

There is a continuous demand for novel and innovative products in the market. In order to develop novel ideas, natural systems are considered to be superior source of inspiration. In order to assist designers in ideation, an analogical design tool called Idea Inspire 3.0 is developed; it is a revised version of Idea-Inspire developed in 2005. The latest version is web-based, and supports retrieval, visualizationand addition of systems. It uses a novel, dynamic representation with amulti-system, multi-instance SAPPhIRE model as basis, and a multi-modal explanation for enhanced understanding that shouldlead to better ideation. In this paper, these latest features of Idea-Inspire along with their potential benefits are discussed.