Using Image Schemas for Supporting the Development of the Metaphors in Product Design

Abstract

Metaphor is a powerful device, especially when it is realized the conceptual metaphor is at the core of human’s cognitions. Design is a domain filled with creativity and communication, which could use metaphor in many ways. Metaphors employed in the products would be one of them, for examples, to reduce required cognitive loads for the product use; to ascribe or emphasize qualities to or of the product. The image schema, as one of the main notions of the conceptual metaphor, is implied to be a good foundation for design approaches regarding the employment and the development of the metaphors and the products to be more practical. After reviewing and analyzing the structure and the framework of designing a product with employed metaphor, two parts of where the image schema can join product development are spotted, which are: the searching for potential entities to be employed in the product in order to establish the metaphor, and, how two entities (the product and the discrete entity going to be employed) are going to be fused in order to reasonably be one artifact. A process is proposed for the development of metaphors in product design, with tools regarding image schemas and others.