HOW AMI DOING? THE LANGUAGE OF APPRAISAL IN DESIGN

Accounts of design practice suggest that how a designer 'feels' influences the way that a designer behaves. In this paper, we approach the notion of 'feeling' through the linguistic process of appraisal. Appraisal is the representation through language of favourable and unfavourable attitudes towards specific subjects. While the linguistic system of appraisal may not be completely isomorphic with the human system of emotions, characterising the language of emotions through a linguistic system allows us to begin an exploration of the affective aspects of the design process. The paper describes a taxonomy for a formal, grammatical analysis of appraisal of design processes, products and people. The taxonomy is used to analyze the way language is structured to adopt attitudinal stances in accounts of design experience. An analysis on design student blogs shows how the appraisal framework systematically accounts for the linguistic resources of appraisal in design and how appraisal inhabits design practice.

[1]  Suzanne Eggins,et al.  An Introduction to Systemic Functional Linguistics , 1994 .

[2]  D. Schoen,et al.  The Reflective Practitioner: How Professionals Think in Action , 1985 .

[3]  Andrew Ortony,et al.  The Referential Structure of the Affective Lexicon , 1987, Cogn. Sci..

[4]  Andrew Ortony,et al.  The Cognitive Structure of Emotions , 1988 .

[5]  Willemien Visser,et al.  Dynamic Aspects of Design Cognition , 2004 .

[6]  John S. Gero,et al.  Design Prototypes: A Knowledge Representation Schema for Design , 1990, AI Mag..

[7]  J. Pennebaker,et al.  Linguistic styles: language use as an individual difference. , 1999, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[8]  Jeannett Martin.  Beyond Exchange : Appraisal Systems in English , 2000 .

[9]  David Rose,et al.  Working with Discourse: Meaning Beyond the Clause , 2003 .

[10]  S. Hunston,et al.  Evaluation in Text: Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse , 2001 .

[11]  J. Forgas.  Feeling and thinking : the role of affect in social cognition , 2000 .

[12]  Michael L. Littman,et al.  Measuring praise and criticism: Inference of semantic orientation from association , 2003, TOIS.

[13]  P. Ekman,et al.  Unmasking the face : a guide to recognizing emotions from facial clues , 1975 .

[14]  Petra Badke-Schaub,et al.  Thinking in design teams - an analysis of team communication , 2002 .

[15]  M. Nussbaum,et al.  Upheavals of Thought: The Romantic Ascent: Emily Brontë , 2001 .

[16]  A. Newell.  Unified Theories of Cognition , 1990 .

[17]  Klaus Fiedler,et al.  Toward an integrative account of affect and cognition phenomena using the BIAS computer algorithm. , 2000 .

[18]  Udo Lindemann,et al.  Effort-saving product representations in design—results of a questionnaire survey , 2001 .

[19]  Michael Halliday,et al.  An Introduction to Functional Grammar , 1985 .

[20]  Janice Langan-Fox,et al.  The Nature and Measurement of Intuition: Cognitive and Behavioral Interests, Personality, and Experiences , 2003 .

[21]  Rianne Valkenburg.  Shared understanding as a condition for team design , 1998 .

[22]  Martha C. Nussbaum.  Upheavals of Thought: Frontmatter , 2001 .

[23]  Nigel Cross,et al.  Natural intelligence in design , 1999 .

[24]  M. Nussbaum.  Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions , 2001 .

[25]  P. Ekman,et al.  DIFFERENCES Universals and Cultural Differences in the Judgments of Facial Expressions of Emotion , 2004 .