“Digging for Meaning”: The Effect of a Designer’s Expertise and Intention on Depth of Product Metaphors

Abstract

In the product-design domain, metaphors are used as a means of communication between designers and users. A designer generates a metaphor by deciding on a quality of a target to highlight and selecting a corresponding source that conveys this quality; the user interprets the designer’s intentions via the end product. The depth of the generated metaphor can be assessed by the extent to which the highlighted quality is salient for the target: Metaphors focusing on a salient quality of the target are termed “surface” metaphors, whereas those focusing on a non-salient quality are called “deep” metaphors. In this article, we investigated both the effect of the expertise level of the designer (i.e., novice or expert) and different types of intention (i.e., pragmatic or experiential) on metaphor depth, through a study in which groups of expert and novice designers were asked to generate metaphors and external judges evaluated the depth of the metaphors created. Results indicated that having a pragmatic intention or being a novice designer led to the generation of surface metaphors, whereas having experiential intentions or being an expert facilitated the generation of deeper metaphors. Detailed observations are included regarding the nature of decisions made during the product metaphor generation process that produce comprehensible and aesthetically pleasing metaphors. Additionally, our findings have implications for metaphor research and design practice.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

We would like to express our deepest gratitude to our participants from Bleijh, Buro Raak, Fabrique, G-Star, IPV Delft, MMID, Muzus, Natwerk, Scope, Studio Anna Noyons, Van der Veer Designers, Waarmakers, We Are Perspective, Wit Industrial Design, de Wolkenrijders, and to our students. A part of the data set used in this article was presented at the DeSForM 2012 Conference in Wellington, New Zealand.

Notes

¹ The non-deliberate use of metaphors is also possible in the design domain. Especially when generating “embodied” product metaphors—the metaphorical associations that are based on people’s innate or sensorimotor knowledge of the world (Forceville et al., 2006)—designers may often not be aware that they are actually employing a metaphor in a particular product, as they do not purposely try to reference a distinct concrete entity. The examples can be making a water jug higher intuitively for it to be perceived as more dominant or making it more “closed” to be perceived as safe and trustworthy, because we all have innate image schemas to associate height with dominance and containment with safety (Van Rompay, Hekkert, & Muller, 2005).

² Glucksberg and colleagues (1997) maintain that the number of relevant attributional dimensions may vary from target to target in relation to verbal metaphors, and these dimensions influence the sources associated with targets and the interpretation of the metaphor recipients.

³ Silvia and Beaty (2012) conducted an experiment in which they asked undergraduate psychology students to generate metaphors and found that the students who generated metaphors in brief response times used a memory-based retrieval strategy, meaning that they searched memory for an apt metaphor and then used it. This strategy yielded common idioms and clichés. However, the students who took their time when responding produced impromptu answers that were more original. On the basis of this study, we intended to investigate whether there is an unintended effect on seeing either salient or non-salient qualities of a target.