Verbal Protocol Analysis Strategy for Product Design Cognition: Preliminary Study on Metaphorical Form Element

Intuition in the form development process often associated with creative and cognition. The employment of metaphorical form, one of the creative intuition, serves as source of inspiration where designers tend to perform abstraction with the justification and reasoning based on the knowledge of design principles and elements. The abstraction direction modeled the outcome of product form through certain style, selection and preference. This study exercised the Verbal Protocol Analysis (VPA) to examine cognitive behavior when designer were given image stimuli options and integrate into product with standard format structure portraying cultural identity. The cognitive preference was examined through an initial of surface analysis of the cognitive dimension direction between expert designers and training designers discovered the distinct pattern between the two, suggesting that experience could influence the maturity in metaphorical element selection. Experienced designer assessed the metaphor as a holistic perspective, whereas the less experienced has the tendency of seeing metaphorical in analytical view, resulting into not choosing the strong character of an image stimuli.