Metaphor is essential to creativity because it involves the ability to detect similarity cross the concept of domains. Metaphorical design techniques have received increasing attention and often used in design problemsolving. However, the creativity and quality of design are hard to assess. The purpose of this study is to measure main factors of metaphorical design: similarity, distance of category and salience imbalance, also proves the relation with creativity. Materials are five metaphorical designs and a semi-structural questionnaire is used to investigate the matching features and categories of product. Several calculations are used to measure the similarity and metaphoricity (the degree of metaphor) of design, and compared with the result of another questionnaire. The result shows this measurement not only explains the content of metaphor thinking but also reflects the quality of design and creativity effectively.
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