An Approach to Measuring Metaphoricity of Creative Design

Abstract

Metaphor is central to design creativity as it involves processes of discovering two different objects which are similar in some perspectives and combining them together into a new and meaningful one. This study argues the degree to which a design contains metaphor is a good indicator of the creativity of the design. In this paper the strength of metaphoricity is a function of feature similarity between its target and source entities, as well as the domain dissimilarity between the two entities. The situation of metaphoricity is the salience imbalance of the similar features between of its target and source entities. To test the argument, five award winners of various well-known creativity-oriented design competitions are accordingly presented to twenty-six design students to assess the metaphoricity strength and saturation, and the creativity on a subjective base. Results reveal the creativity has significantly positive relation between the object similarity metaphoricity saturation.