It has become important to design supra-functional products to change the ordinary into something special, meaningful, and engaging. The practice intends to design supra-functional products that can create a richer emotional response in the users by breaking their common expectations and providing unexpected experiences. Moreover, the practice is intended to explore the possibility of employing the rhetoric figures to design products that can lead to unexpected experiences.
The research method involved first investigating the possibility of using the principles of rhetoric in design. Second, after analyzing the usefulness of rhetoric, and in particular, the application of elocutio, the principles of rhetoric discussed by existing scholars are structured, and a rhetoric figures is proposed as a design tool. Third, design practices are carried out using the principles investigated.
The Practice proceeds in three stages, and the rhetoric figures are applied in different ways in each stage. The first project focuses on exploring the application of the rhetoric figures in the design process and the composition of products based on figures of speech. The second project shifted the focus from employing the rules of rhetoric in the design practices to first establishing product concepts that deviate from standard expectations, and once the deviations are defined, designing the outputs by following the pertinent principles of rhetoric. The focal point of the third project was to enhance the unpredictability of the outputs by following different surprise strategies to design unpredictable experiences while employing the principles of rhetoric relevant to those specific purposes.
The designs derived from this practice are conceived to provide users with unexpected functions and pleasant surprises. The significance of this practice is that it has experimented with whether the rhetoric figures can give emotion or effects that transcend their function through design work. The results suggest that the rhetoric figures could be a tool for design language.