Design Semantic Typicality Calculation in Conceptual Spaces

Abstract

The assessment of typicality is a vital aspect of design evaluations. Based on the theories of fuzzy semantic cell and feature prototype model (FPM), we proposed an objective method to measure design semantic typicality. Design semantic typicality was assessed based on the Euclidian distances between a design case and its prototype. It could be calculated by the mean distance between the prototypes of design features and the prototype of the benchmark category in conceptual spaces. We validate this method in two experiments. Based on the analysis of empirical and experimental results, we confirmed that the proposed method is a promising approach to quantify design semantic typicality, which is able to largely reflect the human perception of design typicality.