The post holder will be a member of the SoCCR Lab with responsibility for the provision of computational support for a Wellcome Trust-funded project, “Hypatia: Health Modelling Made Simple”. The role involves software engineering/programming the Hypatia site, retaining a core knowledge of computational modelling as it relates to health care, neuroscience, and psychology, and liaising with project consultants to develop the UX/UI, backend support, and aesthetics of the platform. The position offers an opportunity to develop and use state-of-the-art methods to build a free browser-based solution to allow simulation and fitting of common computational models, with the final milestone of 12 months to have a working beta version. There is significant opportunity for skill development, including gaining experience of industry liaison, translational neuroscience, and computational modelling expertise.

Engineering designers practice design-by-analogy (DbA) during concept generation to retrieve knowledge from external sources or memory as inspiration to solve design problems. DbA is a tool for innovation that involves retrieving analogies from a source domain and transferring the knowledge to a target domain. While DbA produces innovative results, designers often come up with analogies by themselves or through serendipitous, random encounters. Computational support systems for searching analogies have been developed to facilitate DbA in systematic design practice. However, many systems have focused on a query-based approach, in which a designer inputs a keyword or a query function and is returned a set of algorithmically determined stimuli. In this presentation, a new analogical retrieval process that leverages a visual interaction technique is introduced. It enables designers to explore a space of analogies, rather than be constrained by what’s retrieved by a query-based algorithm. With an exploration-based DbA tool, designers have the potential to uncover more useful and unexpected inspiration for innovative design solutions.