Representing Artefacts as Media: Modelling the Relationship Between Designer Intent and Consumer Experience

Designed artefacts can be experienced in many different ways, including stimulation of the senses, the assignment of meaning and various forms of emotional response (Desmet & Hekkert, 2007; Schifferstein & Hekkert, 2008). Taking everyday products as an example, the chairs presented in Figure 1 can be appreciated for their perceptual properties (e.g. colour, shape, texture), attributed with certain qualities (e.g. comfortable, reliable, adaptable) and they can elicit different feelings (e.g. curiosity, satisfaction, irritation). This variety of interpretations is relevant not just to the physical products of industrial design, but also to the forms and spaces of architecture, the user interfaces of software applications, and the outputs of many other design activities. Designers shape these artefacts to exhibit certain features, and they can intend these features to elicit certain interpretations. As consumers (defined here to include users and other stakeholders1) encounter artefacts, their interpretations may correspond with those that were intended, but might also differ from those intentions in many varied ways. Interpretation cannot be reliably controlled because different people will construct different meanings depending on factors such as context, motivation and values. An interest in the relationship between designers’ intentions and consumers’ interpretations has prompted many design theorists to view design as an instance of communication (see Crilly, Good, Matravers, & Clarkson, 2008). When adopting this perspective, authors across different design disciplines have developed diagrammatic representations that depict the artefact as a communicative medium.2 Perhaps the best-known of these diagrams are Norman’s (1986/1988, p. 16) depiction of the ‘system image’ mediating between the designer’s conceptual model and the user’s mental model, and Krippendorff and Butter’s (1984) communication-based representation of product semantics. While such diagrams are broadly applicable across different design disciplines, there are also a number of more discipline-specific diagrams that appear in different branches of the design literature. For example, de Souza (1993; 2005, p. 88) represents how software interfaces connect programmers to their users; Shedroff (1999, p. 271) represents how producers influence their audience through the use of information design; and Coates (2003, p. 120) represents how physical products mediate between corporations and designers on the one hand, and consumers and the broader