Analysis of the transformation process of verbal narratives into visual narratives based on product semantics perspective

Every design process begins with a design brief that has been given to or created by designers. Throughout the design process, product designers interpret the design briefs and present their own perspectives on the desired product to be designed. Designers carry out the product development process by applying many different design methods. In this context, this study is structured as an analysis of the transformation process between verbal and visual narratives that aims to investigate product designer's perspective about design briefs, user profiles, and the way of product scenario building. The literature of the study reveals the current thinking processes of the designers with a focus on meaning embodiment, product semantics and inter-semiotic transformation methods, whilst also uncovering present design methods that are used in product design process. In the scope of the thesis, sketching sessions including product designers' transformation process of verbal narratives that contain narratives about objects cited from literary books into sketches that can be identified as visual narratives are carried out. These sketching sessions are fed by pre and after-case study interviews that reveal product designers' opinions about design briefs, product design process, product semantics and conducted case studies. The data obtained as a result of all the case studies were analyzed by thematic analysis method, resulting in seven themes. These themes are formed from the interviews and think-aloud protocols and also supported with the sketches of participants. These themes are listed as: Material Quality, Semantic Attributes, User Characteristics, User-Object Interaction, Functional Quality, Object Environment and Technical Quality. In scope of this study, only semantic attributes theme is analyzed. In conclusion section, the output of the entire study carried out in order to analyze the transformation process of verbal narratives into visual narratives from the product semantics perspective is presented. The research questions were re-examined in this section and the findings that provided answers to these questions were presented at the end of the study. As prominent conclusions, verbal narratives about objects encouraged product designers to think deductively, allowed them to empathize with fictive users, to recall past experiences about mentioned objects to use this knowledge in current sketching processes, while bringing product emotions to foreground and enabling the establishment of analogies with different objects. Finally, suggestions were made for further studies, starting from the results of the study conducted.