Design Rhetoric: Studying the Effects of Designed Objects

Many of the ways in which artifacts appear to or actually do affect us-as elegant, dynamic, comfortable, authentic-are based on the fact that they are designed objects. Design is an effect-oriented process that resorts to design rules linking formal aspects of designed artifacts to specific design effects. Design rhetoric tries to capture these links between design techniques and resulting effects. This article presents design-rhetorical methods of identifying design rules of intersubjective validity. The new approach, developed at Bern University of the Arts, combines rhetorical design analysis with practice-oriented design research, based on the creation and empirical testing of design variants in accordance with effect hypotheses.