Meta4acle: Generating Compelling Metaphors for Design

Metaphors have successfully been used by new product development and design teams to help frame the design situation and communicate new products to stakeholders. Yet, the process of finding a compelling metaphor often turns upon stumbling upon it or a flash of insight from a team member. We present Meta4acle: a Metaphor Exploration Tool for design that suggests possible metaphors to make the process more one of ‘seeking out’ than ‘stumbling upon’ an effective metaphor. The tool takes data about the project in the form of a title, domain and key associations required of the metaphor and returns suggestions from a database of possible metaphor sources. We built a Meta4acle prototype and evaluated it with positive results for three existing design case studies. We present plans for its full implementation and evaluation.