12. When Designing for a Culture: Folk Literary Metaphors in Design Anthropology

A society is formed with corporeal and incorporeal elements, like the man himself. Often, rather not surprisingly, the corporeal objects take center stage, as their existence is evident. Design, being a visually dominated discipline by education, puts its preference on visuality as a higher sense than the rest. Thus, it sometimes struggles to grasp all things that are not vision major. The tangibility of the goals in design can also be associated with this line of thinking. However, there has been a major push for understanding intangible cultural heritage in design research. Studies into visual metaphors have been an integral part of design. Yet, it may introduce biases concerning vision. Recent cognitive science shows that metaphor (including visual) is a way of thinking, not just an ornamental patterning of words on a page or a poetic expression of a subject. Instead, metaphor has a conceptual basis which is reflected in metaphorical language. As the folk culture of a place is the bearer of shared cultural memory and interaction history between the corporeal and incorporeal, metaphors used in folk literature can be used as a source in design anthropology, and this review paper systematically discusses this possibility.