Metaphor brainstorming is a powerful ideation and conceptual design technique for generating underlying metaphors, requirements, features, and attributes for new and existing products. Metaphor brainstorming begins with traditional brainstorming of high-level metaphors. These metaphors are then deconstructed into their components and attributes. Finally, the items from the deconstruction are mapped to potential features, requirements, or attributes of the new product. Metaphor brainstorming is most useful during the early stages of design for developing conceptual models, generating requirements, and early user interface design where you are specifying the relationship between features and specific user interface metaphors. This presentation will describe the metaphor brainstorming process and explain how take the output and convert that into requirements and design concepts.

Chauncey Wilson is a Senior User Researcher at Autodesk in Waltham, MA and instructor in the HFID graduate program at Bentley College. He has more than 25 years of experience in HCI. Chauncey has presented at CHI, UPA, HFES, APA, and STC conferences and has co-authored chapters in the 1997 Handbook of HCI, and Cost-Justifying Usability, Second Edition: An Update for the Internet Age. Chauncey wrote “The Well-Tempered Practitioner” column for the ACM CHI publication “interactions” during 2006 and 2007, collaborated on the UPA Code of Conduct, and is editor of the Methods sections of the UPA Body of Knowledge (BoK).