Applications of Metaphor Theory to Product Design Hun Hung-Hsiang Wang* and Wan-Ju Liao** Graduate Institute of Innovation and Design, National Taipei University of Technology, Taiwan * wanghh@ntut.edu.tw ** vein72@hotmail.com Abstract: Th is p aper in troduces app lications of Andrew Ortony’s salie nce imbalance theory a nd Ellen Winner’s domain di stance t heory t o metaphors in t he area of i ndustrial desi gn. T his st udy classifies features of tar gets and sources in a metaphorical product into (1) visual (or form) level, (2) action levels (either taxonomy or category at macro level, or behavior or action at micro level), and (3 ) im age (o r sym bolic) lev el. Salience im balance is tested feature m atching, and domain distances are esti mated b y m ulti-dimensional scalin g. Six teen p articipants were ask ed t o i dentify the sources of five citrus squeezers, and then determine the visual-level and action-level features of the targets and so urces in priority order, respectively, as well as the sim ilarity between the targets and s ources. Results re veal salience imbalance theory is no t com pletely ex plainable for metaphorical products, and suggest the positive relationship between metaphoricity and creativity . This st udy proposes a fo ur-quadrant fram ework t o sort t he metaphorical product s wi th different creativity levels. Keywords: Metaphor, salience imbalance theory, domain distance theory, industrial design 1. Introduction Metaphor is a device for seeing something in terms of something else [1]. Lakoff and Johnson claimed that our conceptual system is fundamentally metaphoric in nature, and Lakoff further asserted that metaphor is not just about lan guage, but also ab out thou ght in th e way that we con ceptualize on e do main in terms of t he o ther [8 ]. Still, metaphor is the way we understand new things is to conceive of them in terms of things we already know. Since design is about the processes of designers to create new products, and the new products conceived by users, the role of metaphor to play in design is twofold. First, metaphor in design processes can help designers define unfamiliar des ign problems, gene rate ne w desi gn s olutions, as well as com municate t heir desi gns wi th t he stakeholders by juxtaposing something unfamiliar or new with known situations [3]. Second, metaphor within products can be a powerful tool for conceptualizing, orienting, and personifying products [12]. In a sense, we can say design is i ntrinsically about metaphor, because creative design often refers to such processes or products of juxtaposition as metaphor. Metaphor i s widely vi ewed a s a sel ective mapping of features bet ween two c onceptual dom ains, na mely, the target and source [6, 7, 15, 16]. Andrew Ortony’s salience imbalance theory claims that metaphoricity involves a difference i n r elative sal ience am ong t he matching feat ure from t he target an d s ource. What di stinguishes metaphor from literal similarity is an asymmetry in the salience of the features that are shared between the target and source. In the area o f language or rhetoric there are many observations that metaphors tend to be strongly 757