Evaluating and translating cultural symbol design: An AHP-TOPSIS evaluation framework based on the Chaoshan five-element Gable Walls

Translating culturally saturated ornament into contemporary design often collapses meaning into surface resemblance and lacks auditable methods that generalize across diverse scenarios (e.g., product and public-information settings). Focusing on the Chaoshan Five-Element gable, this study models heritage semantics as an evaluative system and tests how such semantics guide concrete design choices. It operationalizes a transparent, reproducible decision framework that integrates kansei structuring, AHP weighting with internal consistency control, TOPSIS ranking, and robustness analyses, with portability demonstrated via contextual reweighting for wayfinding. Expert judgments from a 16-member panel exhibit acceptable logical consistency (CR = 0.06) and substantial agreement (Kendall’s W = 0.79), while a user survey (n = 300) supports scale reliability and content validity (I-CVI = 0.83–1.00; S-CVI/Ave = 0.91). In the primary application to two tea-set designs, TOPSIS closeness favors Teaware A over Teaware B (Ci = 0.676 vs. 0.642). For historical-district wayfinding, criteria are reweighted to emphasize legibility, visibility, and universal comprehension; the concept-level strategies rank S2 Anchor markers (0.664) > S3 Color coding (0.641) > S1 Decorative border (0.603) > S4 Modern baseline (0.521). Across ±5/10% weight perturbations and leave-one-out checks on experts and criteria, rank concordance remains high (Spearman ρ ≈ 0.90–0.95), indicating stable preferences. Beyond these cases, the framework is potentially transferable: the criterion skeleton and contextual reweighting logic can be reused, but cross-site validation is required before claiming broader generalizability across cultural settings.