Design Creativity 2010 part 11. What is ‘design creativity’? It is impossible to answer this question without considering why human beings can – and do – ‘design’. Design creativity is instrumental in not only addressing social problems faced across the world, but also evoking an innate appreciation for beauty and a sense of personal contentment. | An Approach to Measuring Metaphoricity of Creative Design Hung-Hsiang Wang and Jung-Hsuan Chan National Taipei University of Technology Taiwan 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 and metaphoricity saturation. Keywords design creativity metaphor similarity industrial design 1 Introduction Metaphor is not only a style in speech and writing but a resourceful method of human s thinking in daily life Lakoff and Johnson 1999 . It has been thought the kernel ability of creativity that helps us to creatively put two things from two different domains together into a new one Seitz 1997 Ricoeur 1981 . Metaphors have long been recognized to play an important role in industrial design Hey and Agogino 2007 . Metaphor is often used at earlier stages of conceptual design to solve problems or interpret meaning in a creative way. The conceptual design starting with an initial design goal through ideation evaluation and finalization can be seen as a process of defining a target searching sources to construct pairs of the target and sources as alternatives .
