Metaphor-based Cultural Element Re-creation In Product Design

Cultural re-creation is a new measure of culture reuse, aiming to give old culture a new life based on understanding and analysis. This paper summarized the method of cultural element re-creation in product design, to promote the behavioral and emotional interaction between product and user, thus helping culture express on an intangible level.The metaphorlogy is a branch of linguistics. Studies on metaphorlogy mainly focus on its rhetorical role, cognitive function, generation mechanism and usage, combining with the context, pragmatics, semantic, syntactic, and other factors. Metaphor, as an expression way, then develops into cognitive mode, as well as a thinking method, and be widely used in various field. Metaphor works well in massive design cases, especially in advertisement design and visual design of interface. Modern product design develops towards multi-dimensional sensory augmentation and emphasizes the synesthesia of function. How to extract cultural element effectively and take advantage of the intelligent and interactive features of the product with metaphor methods is the key point of this paper.Firstly, we analyzed the relationship between culture and product making, defined "culture re-creation", and then came up with the thought and methods. Secondly, discuss the possibility and its methods of culture re-creation with metaphor on product design. Methods, including sememe analysis, elastic metaphor, and emotional interaction, then be applied in to a case of tourism product design. Thirdly, information technology, mainly sensor technology, realized the re-creation design. At last, in the tourism products design case, two intelligent desktop humidifiers were designed with the cultural elements we extracted from the culture of Hangzhou West Lake, which proves the theories and methods practical.