The role of designer expertise in source selection during product metaphor generation

The role of designer expertise in source selection during product metaphor generation

Cila, N.
Hekkert, P.P.M.
Visch, V.T.

Industrial Design Engineering

Industrial Design

2012-12-31

Metaphors have a communicative role in design that entails a transfer of meaning from an entity (i.e. source) to the designed product (i.e. target). In this paper, we investigate the effect of the expertise of designer on the accessibility of the sources that they employ in metaphors. In the study conducted, novice and expert designers were asked to generate metaphors and the sources they selected were used for analysis. The results indicated that, (1) novices tended to select easily accessible sources whose similarity with the target was obvious, and (2) experts tended to use sources that are less similar with the target, which are more difficult-to-access in the first place. These results are then discussed in the light of metaphor theories and product design knowledge.

product metaphors, metaphor generation, source selection,expertise, source accessibility, target-source similarity

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:735b8ba7-305e-4d7b-82f7-0277d1eee389

s.n.

978-0-475-12389-3

Design and Semantics of Form and Movement; Proceedings of the DeSForM 2012: Meaning, Matter, Making Conference, Wellington (New Zealand), 18-20 April, 2012

Institutional Repository

conference paper

(c) 2012 The Authors