Exploring The Role of Metaphor in Postmodern Movement in Product Design*

Language is the mind device to develop human’sperception from world and metaphor is the mind tool to extend the language, so poets and artists utilize metaphorsto extend language and consequently mind’sperception of reality. As we know in movement from modern to postmodern era everything including art and culture encountered a variety of changes and one of these changes was emergence of metaphor and allegory in art pieces to develop this deferent interpretation of reality. Actually the elite class suggested thesekind of solutions to confront the solo and gray voice of modern art. The objective of this survey is to define details of this changes in product language. In general metaphor is originated from the Greek root“metaphora” constituted from “meta” meaning beyondand “pherein”meaning conveying, technically this word means displacement of one phrase or wordwith another because of the similarity between them, as if the first one is exactly the second.  However from a structuralist aspectmetaphoris the displacement of an element from different context in syntagmatic axe, and Syntagmatic axe in this definition is the order of element organization in each language. Beside the concept of syntagmatic axe we have paradigmatic axe that checks the order of displacement of words for each other. When this kind of displacement happens from a different and unfamiliar context the metaphor shapes in the language and causes to extend the borders of it.In the field of product design, languageof products obeysfrom special rules and to understand these rules the linguistic principles must be studied originally and these two fields– product linguistics and general linguistics – be adopted to each other. This article which has been written with descriptive – analytic approach attempts to define metaphor from structuralist view.At first the syntagmatic and paradigmatic axes are defined, the metaphor will be discussed with the model of text analysis by Roman Jacobson, the diagram of Offenbach about product language is considered as syntagmatic axe in this field and displacement of the elements in this diagram is discussed as metaphor in product language. Actually Products are analyzed as a piece of text.Consequently from a historical perspective of view emergence of metaphors in art and product design in first years of postmodern development will be discussed. The historical perspective of the survey includes the alterations that happened from 1970 and after that in Italy as Radical Design with the leadership of EttoreSottsass, in Germany as anti – modernand New Design, In England in the Punk designer works, Ron Arad, and in Netherland with the author-oriented approach of Droog Design.However this kind of thinking about products helps designers to have completely different points of view in every aspect of design and provides infinite possibilities for them to create new products and ideas. Utilizing metaphors in designing products not only make them more attractive and interactive but also extend the experience of daily life for users in interaction with products through the language that has been expanded.