A is B, displacement: Exploring linking patterns within metaphor in the design process

Design educators often apply metaphor as a teaching tool to help novice designers in their design process. Richards(1936) defines metaphor as the form “A is Bi. The most important operation in metaphor is displacement “ the linking process of moving A to B. Linking ideas is the key mechanism in the design process. By linking ideas, a graph-like knowledge represents the individual memories with the nodes and arcs that are the ideas and the links between ideas respectively. Such linking knowledge provides an interesting way to understand the operation of displacement within metaphor. This research applies a computational tool (called DIM) to produce a graph-like knowledge. Protocol analysis is then used to understand how designers organize ideas. The objective of this research was to explore the linking patterns of idea displacement within metaphor in the design process