In creative and conceptual designing, architects often look to books, magazines, and other collections of images to find forms they can adopt and adapt in designs. On line visual collections are becoming available but typically they are indexed only with descriptive key words. We argue that in addition to key word indexing, which supports retrieval of images based on design concepts or issues, a more directly visual, graphical reminding scheme based on sketches can help designers recall interesting references from various domains. We describe Drawing Analogies, a shape based reminding program that uses hand drawn sketches to index and query visual databases.

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