A practical approach to translating social cultural patterns into new design

People buy products to express their desired identity and therefore prefer products that fit their own personality. The personality of products is created by implicit and explicit design features. However the translation of implicit and explicit design characteristics into new designs is difficult for designers. Especially for beginning design students, giving meaning to products by thinking about product associations is really a difficult job. Therefore a design tool has been developed that provides the students with a simple structural step by step support for the design process. The tool is based on a simple input-translation-output model and has been introduced step by step in the first year’s design course “Methods of Design”. The main focus of this course is to support gaining insight into the cultural patterns of certain target groups and learn to translate associative terms into new design. By using the design tool students create designs that are meaningful to the target groups because the product’s semantics are recognizable.