Metaphors we design by
2009-2013 (PhD thesis)
Imagine a coffee maker that subtly references the serving gesture of a butler or a car that explicitly mimics the sleek and streamlined form of a jet plane. Such metaphors (see my old blog that displays many product metaphor examples) are frequently used by designers as a means to render the values and meanings they want to assign to a product into a physical form. By their nature, metaphors build meaningful relationships between two distinct entities, which urge us to see things in a new light. For this reason, designers resort to metaphors to exhibit original and aesthetic solutions to design problems.
Still, the use of metaphors has not taken up the importance in design academia as it did in design practice. In my PhD thesis, I aimed to propose a structured means to incorporate metaphor in design research by investigating a product metaphor’s characteristics and the peculiar type of thought process that generates it. The key research questions I intended to answer were: (1) What is a product metaphor? (2) How is a product metaphor generated? and (3) Which decisions of designers lead to good product metaphors?
By providing provisional answers to these questions, I gradually built the model below that accounted for the processes underlying product metaphor generation and examined the success of the decisions taken in this process. The thesis were directed at the design/linguistics researchers who aim to broaden their view on the functions and meanings of metaphor through the analysis of metaphors found in the design domain, and the design practitioners who are interested in integrating metaphors in their designs as a means for creating meaningful product experiences.
A (very) short summary of the model:
A product metaphor mediates between the experience process of a user and the generation process of a designer. A user goes through the stages of perceiving that a metaphor has been employed in a product, recognizing its target and source, comprehending why these particular entities are brought together, and appreciating (or not) this association. A designer has a particular intention to attain through the target and comes up with a meaning to convey accordingly, finds a source that can assign this meaning to the product, and creates a mapping from this source to the target. These processes are also influenced by the background characteristics and capabilities of both parties, how they envision each other, and external factors of the context.
The intention of designers to employ a metaphor may be for pragmatic or experiential reasons. When unearthing a meaning to convey on the basis of this intention, they can either focus on more obvious meanings (i.e., surface metaphor) or hidden and unrevealed ones (i.e., deep metaphor). This meaning can also be based on our universal, innate knowledge (i.e., embodied metaphor) or on the knowledge we acquire through our life experiences (i.e., cultural metaphor).
Designers are then required to come up with a source that can assign this meaning to the target they design through their association. For effective communication, this source needs to have the intended meaning as a salient property, be highly related to the target yet belong to another categorical domain, be novel yet understandable, have application potential, and finally, have the potential of creating a complete, functional product. After finding a source, designers then turn this metaphorical idea into a physical reality via mapping. For this, they need to consider which properties of a source to project onto the product (e.g., form, interaction, material, sound, movement, smell, name, graphics) and how to conduct the mapping (e.g., literal or abstract, target-driven or source-driven).
Related Publications:
Cila, N. & Hekkert, P. (2020). Generating metaphors in product design. In Gargett A. & J Barnden (Eds.), Producing Figurative Expression (pp. 299-330). John Benjamins.
Hekkert, P. & Cila, N. (2015). Handle with care! Why and how designers make use of product metaphors. Design Studies, 40(1), 196-217.
Cila, N., Hekkert, P. & Visch, V. (2014). “Digging for meaning”: The effect of a designer’s expertise and intention on depth of product metaphors. Metaphor & Symbol, 29(4), 257-277.
Cila, N., Borsboom, F. & Hekkert, P. (2014). Determinants of aesthetic preference for product metaphors. Empirical Studies of the Arts, 32(2), 183-203.
Cila, N., Hekkert, P. & Visch, V. (2014). Source selection in product metaphor generation: The effect of salience and relatedness. International Journal of Design, 8(1), 15-28.
Cardoso, C. & Cila, N. (2013). Analogies and metaphors. In A. van Boeijen, J. Daalhuizen, J. Zijlstra & R. van der Schoor (Eds.), Delft Design Guide (pp. 113-115). Amsterdam: BIS Publishers.
Cila, N., Özcan, E. & Hekkert, P. (2012). Product metaphor generation: Mapping strategies of designers. Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on Design and Emotion, London, United Kingdom.
Cila, N., Hekkert, P. & Visch, V. (2012). The role of designer experience in source selection during product metaphor generation. In Proceedings of the DeSForM 2012: Meaning, Matter, Making Conference, Wellington, New Zealand.
Markussen, T., Özcan, E. & Cila, N. (2012). Beyond metaphor in product use and interaction. In Proceedings of the DeSForM 2012: Meaning, Matter, Making Conference, Wellington, New Zealand.
Cila, N., Hekkert, P. & Visch, V. (2011). Elephants, tornados, and vacuum cleaners: Generating product metaphors. Poster presented at the Researching and Applying Metaphor (RaAM) Seminar Metaphor Across Time and Genre, Almagro, Spain.
Cila, N., Hekkert, P. & Visch, V. (2010). “As light as a leaf”: Product Metaphor Generation for Experience-Driven Design. In Proceedings of the 7th International Design & Emotion Conference 2010, Chicago (USA).
Cila, N. &. Hekkert, P. (2009). Product Metaphors: A Framework for Metaphor Generation and Experience in Products. Proceedings of International Association of Societies of Design Research (IASDR) 2009, Seoul (South Korea), 316-320.