This paper presents a computational framework to study the effects of the use of analogy in design teams on team cohesion and team collaboration. The paper also reports on the new conceptual insights and lessons learnt while developing the model. The lessons learnt are particularly useful, because the use of computational models to study social aspects of team work in design research is still a fairly recent development, and the challenges and benefits in the process of formalizing abstract concepts into computational details are rarely discussed in the literature.