Hi David and the list
Your suggestion of thinking about "metaphoring" as something we do is
really helpful. All metaphors (noun) do after all is bring together
two contrasting conceptual domains, it is us that find the relevant
mappings between them.
I wonder whether, within the design community, our understanding of
metaphor has been distorted by the often quoted example of the desktop
graphical user interface? I think there is a temptation to see
metaphor as a means of bringing ALL the elements of a system under a
structure projected from a different domain of experience. But surely
metaphors don't work this way (probably not even the desktop GUI),
they are a means of structuring the target domain but this structuring
is highly selective, there is not a one to one correspondence between
all the elements in the source and target domains. Metaphors highlight
some aspects of a target domain and hide others. Equally not all the
structure of the source domain is projected onto the target domain.
Every aspect of highly complex situations/systems are unlikely to be
captured by one metaphor but nonetheless metaphors have a role to play
by reducing complexity down to a "human-scale".
I was also intrigued Fil's statement that "all models are metaphors" -
which begs the question do models always involve mappings between two
different and contrasting conceptual domains?
best
Phil Jones
On 6 Apr 2010, at 13:00, David Sless wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> It's pleasing to see this turn of discussion to focus on metaphor.
> Vico would also be pleased.
>
> Gradually, when you do this, you discover that metaphor is
> ubiquitous, unavoidable, and a necessity of communication of any
> kind. It arises out of the simple though profound act of making
> something stand for something else. It's also pleasing to see Don
> Norman's comments on affordances. J J Gibson had something much more
> profound in mind than the way it got picked up in the design/hci
> community.
>
> It might be helpful when considering metaphor to stop focusing on
> metaphor as a noun and think of the action: Metophoring or
> metaphorising (apologies for the inelegant words). Metaphorising is
> something we do. Once you think of it as an action rather than a
> *thing* many of the problems associated with 'metaphor' dissolve.
>
> BTW, unless you want to get caught in a quagmire, Donald, I wouldn't
> go near 'signifier' even with somebody else's barge pole, let alone
> my own.
>
> David
> --
|