A vocabulary of meaning of designed commercial artefacts based on naturally occurring language use

Abstract

This study is a survey of the English-language words that are used when speaking about meaning with specific focus on the categories of function, ritual and myth. Such words can be used in interviews, questionnaires, measurement metrics and other forms of ethnography and testing. Understanding why consumers perceive designed artefacts to be personally relevant is a commercial imperative. Previous research has suggested that three categories of meaning are commonly encountered, i.e. function, ritual and myth. They cover a spectrum from the purely instrumental to the purely symbolic. However, despite the logical and philosophical groundwork, there has been little analysis of the actual words and phrases that are in everyday use by people when describing the meanings of designed artefacts. The objectives of the study described here were (1) to identify the words and phrases that are most frequently encountered in everyday language when discussing meaning, (2) to determine for each word or phrase its degree of belonging to the formal categories of function, ritual and myth and (3) to thematically group the words and phrases into macro-components of meaning. Three different analysis were performed. The first was based on the contents of major online dictionaries and thesauri, the second was based on the results from queries of the online lexical database WordNet and the third was based on a corpus analysis approach involving neural network word embedding algorithms. Thematic grouping of the database of extracted words and phrases suggested that in all three cases the macro-components of the concept of ‘function’, ‘ritual’ and ‘myth’ cover a spectrum that can be considered to be from an essential property (‘intention’, ‘ceremonial’ and ‘belief’) to an emergent property (‘action’, ‘spiritual’ and ‘symbolism’). The list of words, phrases and macro-components provides a first empirically established vocabulary of meaning for use in design activity.