The Design Semantics Database (DSD) is a pioneering semantic design assistant that offers scientifically based insights into the meaning and emotional effects of design choices.

Whether you are an architect, industrial, interior, graphic or brand designer, the DSD is your preferred design assistant when it comes to design semantics. A huge time-saver as it serves instant design information based on more than 20 years of research.

• Keywords, primary colours, colour palettes, shapes, compositions, body language, sounds, symbols, tastes and their interrelations, can be searched according to meaning and emotional effect.
• Colour & culture information.
• For analysing as well as for creation of design and art.
• To pin down meaning of keywords and their hierarchical level, so that misunderstandings can be avoided in research and briefings, with fewer redo’s as a result.
• By consciously making use of synaesthesia, designers get full control over the values, emotions and atmospheres they want to radiate and can strengthen or weaken them perfectly.
• Filled with research quotes from universities and institutions around the world, providing designers with valuable information that helps them substantiate their design choices.
• Based on the congenital processing of sensory and emotional stimuli the DSD structure naturally connects with intuition and gut feeling.
• The DSD puts a decisive step towards a dictionary that helps to understand the human ability of comprehension, imagination and intuition.
• Responding to the new evolutions in design practice, as design becomes more and more a sense-making creative activity.
• Definitely a tool for the future as endless refinement of meaning is incorporated.

Following data and interfaces are available right at your fingertips

• More than 1800 keywords linked in a logic semantic network.
• More than 160 quotes from international scientific research.
• The meaning of 64 colour combinations, specific hues, shapes, textures, and postures.
• Interfaces for analysing and creating such as the Shape Analyser, the Function Analyser and the Keyword Analyser.
• Culture related information on use of colour.
• Primary colours, shapes, compositions, body posture, movement and taste related to meaning emotional effect.
• Synaesthetic relationships of colour, shape, composition, texture, and postures.
• 23 context related search terms.