To finish
my masters in Design for Interaction (DfI) I needed to do a graduation project.
This is a project that takes about a semester and is usually a design project done
for a company, but there is also an option to do a research project at the
faculty. When searching for an assignment I found a project to do research on product
metaphors. It was still very vague but I liked the idea of looking at product
design from a new perspective: using metaphors. Up to then my idea of a
metaphor was a figure of speech, which combines two ideas into a new idea.
When I
started talking with my mentor (Nazli Cila, a PHD student doing research on
Product Metaphors) and my chair (Paul Hekkert, Professor and chair of the
Design Aesthetic section) it became apparent that there was already a lot known
about product metaphors and metaphors in different forms. An exploration would
not be very useful so it would be better to come up with a theory and see if
that would be true. The theory we came up with was the following: a product
metaphor becomes more aesthetically pleasing when the source (reference to the
other idea) is novel yet, comprehensible and when the mapping (how the source
is presented in the product) is subtle, yet identifiable.
Okay, so
lets break this down, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson came with the theory (they
are kind of considered to be the ones that made this theory big) that metaphors
aren’t some strange things only poets make, but that it is actually a very
central part of our mental process. It is our way of understanding something by
means of something else. So for example when, in Skakespeare’s “Romeo and
Juliette (?)”, Romeo says something like “… Jullia is like the sun…” we know he
doesn’t mean that she is a flaming hot ball of fire many times the size of the
earth far away. But our mind can turn that around and link only certain
properties from the sun to Jullia: being bright, radiant and warm. This
selection and transfer of these properties is called mapping. But the esmaple
“Temperatures are rising” is a metaphor, temperatures don’t rise, not
physically, but because we plot them on graphs we know that when it gets warm,
the line goes up, so the temperature ‘rises’.
There have
been lots of theories on what makes a good metaphor, some say that the source
(in ‘julia is the sun’ the sun) and target (Julia) need to be conceptually very
different, this means that these concepts don’t have much, if anything, in
common. Others say that they need to be as similar as possible for the metaphor
to be good. It seems that there is a truth in both of these theories in that
when the target and source are too different people won’t understand it, but
when they are too similar it won’t be seen as a metaphor. It might just be that
both sides are talking about something different. First of all a metaphor needs
to be understood, because else there is no interpretation, so this is why the
target and source need to have some similarity. But it also needs that bit of
creativity, that spark of brilliance, which is described as being conceptually
different. So there probably needs to be some sort of balance between both.
Tourangeau and Sternberg have a very nice theory about it. (look it up J)
This idea
of metaphor has been researched or talked about in a couple of different forms:
newspaper cartoons, art, advertisements and movies. Product metaphors is a
subject that hasn’t been published a lot about, but most of the subjects, as
stated earlier, have some similarities, so a lot could be learned. First of
all, a metaphor needs to be found by an observer, this sounds quite obvious but
if nobody sees it there is no interpretation and thus no produced metaphor.
Also because every person is different in terms of background and culture, it
is inevitable that different people have different interpretations of the
metaphor. This might even lead to an interpretation that the producer of the
metaphor didn’t envision.
Anyway,
with all this information I set out to do a study, I took 60 product metaphors
(a couple presented above and left) and let 60 participants rate them on: novelty,
comprehensibility, subtlety, identifiability and aesthetic preference. The
participants were all students in the Netherlands recruited either by social
media or colourful posters at the universities in Delft, Utrecht, Leiden and
Amsterdam.
The results
were very good! After some statistical analyses, I found out that all four
factors (novelty, comprehensibility, subtlety and identifiability) influence
the aesthetic appreciation in a positive way. In the graphs below I plotted the
novelty against the comprehensibility and the subtlety against the
identifiability, where the bigger the dot the bigger the aesthetic preference.
There is a very interesting effect between the novelty and comprehensibility
because you can see that the ones that are high on both also have a higher
aesthetic appreciation. The graph of subtlety against identifiability shows this
is a far lesser extend.
So, this is
great! But then again it might be good to dig deeper into the contrast of
subtlety and identifiability, and there is no better way that to design the
products themselves J. So the idea was to create to product metaphors
and let them vary on subtlety and identifiability. The first one was a coffee
mug that refers to a Koala Bear to convey the message of warmth and friendship.
And the second one was an USB stick that refers to a castle tower, to convey
the message of protection of your data. Below are the variations.
From this
study I found that identifiability has more effect on the aesthetic
appreciation than the subtlety. So this confirmed the results of the first
study. But looking further I found out that the highest appreciation is found
then the identifiability is high, no matter how subtle. But when the
identifiability is lower it needs to be more subtle. I guess that this means
that people like to see what a product metaphor refers to, but if it isn’t
clear, it should be pushed away. Does this make sense? (Ah well, nobody that
read it..)
At the end
of July I presented this work and finshed my studies with a whopping 8.5! J So, needless to say I was really
happy with it.
I’m not
sure yet what I’ll do afterwards, it has been 2 months since, and still I haven’t
decided if I would like to do research or designing. If it would be possible I’d
do both, I seem to like to write, but maybe what I write about isn’t that good…
J But
this blog might lend itself more to that: I like the analyzing of other
products. So I hope maybe instead of showing process on one of my projects, I
might give my thoughts on some projects and learn something from it J.
anyway,
this was it, see you next week J. (hopefully a bitless writing :))
Frank
