Some Thoughts On Metaphor in Designing

Here's a somewhat tardy addition to the previous discussion of metaphor in
design.  

Two local scholars, Mark Johnson and C. A. Bowers have written extensively
on the subject.  I suspect members of this list are very familiar with the
contributions of Lakoff and Johnson but may not know Bowers. His is a
critique of language as it relates to the environmental crisis. He writes
about metaphors as root analogues in our thinking that because they are
products of an industrial era have become unseen barriers (like the legs on
the table) to the fresher thinking needed to develop ecological health and
sustainability.

We have our root metaphors in design too which organize and filter our
thoughts and we should probably be asking ourselves what they are and how
they are silently directing how we think about and do designing.

One is style.  If I am designing a house, someone will invariably ask, "What
style is it in?"  If I answer Craftsman or Northwest (mostly just to avoid a
longer discussion about the need to do work that is about one's own time and
place), they are usually satisfied because the concept calls up a mental
pattern of qualities that they are familiar with.  Another architect friend
was doing a housing project he described as "country in the city."  The
houses were being built in an urban area, but were intended as an organizing
concept to express qualities and relationships associated with the country
and village life.

Those are just two examples (out of the many I sure you could all add) of
the way that metaphors are employed as higher level organizational devices
to gather together patterns of associated qualities in design.

I've employed metaphors more directly in designing as "seeing asŠ" and
"mapping asŠ" This is not the familiar rabbit as a duck image from
Wittgenstein.

Seeing asŠ
In the most direct sense a wall is a wall.  But I can "see it asŠ" a seat,
or an enclosure, or a boundary marker, or as a portal into understanding
local history, or - you get the idea.  Seeing asŠ is fundamental to
understanding, experiencing and making a richer, fuller, multi-dimensional,
just and poetic world.

Lakoff says that metaphors are quality pumps.  If I say pelicans are pigs, I
am not equating the two but extracting the quality of a pig's eating to
convey my meaning about pelicans overflowing beaks.  In everyday language we
are continuously borrowing qualities from the culture's quality bank (so to
speak) in order to more vividly express and focus our meaning.

I remember a Pulitzer Prize winning poet say on the PBS News Hour, "It all
begins when I start talking about one thing in terms of something else."

Mapping asŠ
I see seeing asŠ as the awareness side of designing and mapping asŠ as the
doing.  Expression, or the mapping and composition of qualities is an almost
never discussed aspect of designing.  Probably because problem solving is
easier to talk about and teach. Composition, whether in language, music or
other realms of designing requires taking a turn around the metaphoric
corner and spending some time browsing at the metaphor store.

Mapping asŠ in designing is making qualities, and more importantly, patterns
of qualities physical - making physical metaphoric compositions, if you
will.  Poems are metaphorically complex and dense and so are designs.

We think about the mixing of metaphors as bad, but Helen Vendler in her
introduction to her book on Shakespeare's Sonnets talks about catechresis
(mixing metaphors) as a brilliant compositional layering of qualities to
produce the overall, additive meaning or effect.

Mixing metaphors in everyday language might be a bad habit, but in design
and designing a compositional habit to be desired and perfected.

Best to all,

Jerry



-- 
Jerry Diethelm
Architect - Landscape Architect
Planning & Urban Design Consultant

    Prof. Emeritus of Landscape Architecture
           and Community Service € University of Oregon
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