I, too, find the discussion on metaphor rich and compelling, but I
wish to go beyond. If you will, I want to do what good designers are
supposed to do and get at the root cause. So away with metaphor. let
us go deeper.
This discussion has tossed about many concepts, but the one that got
me thinking was "affordance," I word with which I have a passing
acquaintance and which I now somewhat disown. "Away," I say to
affordance, "you have done as much harm as good. You never listened to
me when you were young and now it is too late to reform." , For most
uses in design, I have launched upon a campaign to replace with the
word "signifier. But that is a different story for a different time.)
I realized the affordance/signifier were in a completely different
category than metaphor, and this illuminated the issue. An affordance,
or if you will, a signifier, is a design tool. There are many such
tools. Interactive designers have signifiers, visibility, feedback,
causal chain, mapping, etc. Other areas of design have their own
tools, guides, and laws. But none of these are in the same category
as a metaphor: A metaphor illuminates. It ties different things
together. It provides structure. Aha! This is not about metaphors: it
is about the need for structure.
Why do some wish to use metaphors? It is, I believe, because the
appropriate metaphor gives a theme and consistency, form and
structure, and coherence and understanding to the final design.
So let us think about this: let me use the word Structure to capture
all of that.
I have long argued that what makes a design powerful, beautiful,
understandable, and usable is a good conceptual model, so that people
can understand where everything fits together and what everything's
role is.
But that is also what a good metaphor is meant to do.
Or stories: Stories establish a theme. Stories are much more
appropriate for services -- for interactive design -- because they
capture the time course of the interaction.
But whatever you call it: metaphor, story, schema, theme, structure,
conceptual model: all are intended to do the same thing: to establish
coherence and understanding.
=====
That is the first order analysis.
Second-order analyses do show that all of these different approaches
are somewhat different. I, myself, am not a fan of metaphor because i
find it too restrictive. No modern, complex system is captured
properly by a single metaphor. Worse, there are always things that
don't apply, and therefore a sense of confusion. (An atom with its
electrons spinning about (classical view) is like the sun and the
planets. Except that an atom is not hot. How is the young student
supposed to know that? The "desktop" metaphor is especially strained.
Nothing on the desktop anymore is like a real desktop. (The desktop
metaphor was strained on day one.)
Metaphors are useful in getting started, perhaps, but once started, i
urge dropping them: they are too restraining. They are always false
(that is why they are called "metaphors" rather than "reality"). BUT,
you must replace them with compelling, cohesive structures.
Of course, as Lakoff and his multiple collaborators have argued, all
language is metaphoric. Moreover, one can metaphorically interpret
anything. That is, you can't escape it. It's the way the mind works.
Cheers.
Don
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