Metaphor Design Interaction
The characteristics of Metaphor in the field
Interaction Design
“Logic is a very elegant tool,” he [Gregory Bateson] said, “And we've got a lot of mileage out of it for two thousand years or so. The trouble is, you know, when you apply it to crabs and porpoises, and butterflies and habit formation” — his voice trailed off, and he added after a pause, looking
out over the ocean — “you know, to all those pretty things” — and now, looking straight at me — “logic won't quite do...because that whole fabric of living things is not put together by logic. You see when you get circular trains of causation, as you always do in the living world, the use of logic will make you walk into paradoxes.”
He stopped again, and at that moment I suddenly had an insight, making a connection to something I had been interested in for a long time.
I got very excited and said with a provocative smile: “Heraclitus knew that!
... And so did Lao Tzu.”
“Yes, indeed; and so do the trees over there. Logic won't do for them.”
“So what do they use instead?”
“Metaphor.”
“Metaphor?”
“Yes, metaphor. That's how the whole fabric of mental
interconnections holds together. Metaphor is right at the bottom of
being alive.”
from Uncommon Wisdom: Conversations with Remarkable People by Fritjof Capra
Abstract
The feature of metaphor has often been misunderstood in interaction design. Metaphor has been called “not only unhelpful, but harmful”
(Cooper, 1995)
It has been obstructive in design and unsatisfactory about how products work. If Metaphor used in better methods, it can be very helpful tool for designers in both ways of designing and within products . Metaphor can be useful to redefine design problems and help to solve them. It can be used as a discovering tool, to understand new subject areas, or as means to produce new ideas about common subjects. By its contribution products can be deal in both to the stakeholders as well as consumers. It can indicate users how to understand product. In short, metaphor can help interaction designers for modifying behavior.
Metaphor provides us with the way to understand our complicated digital devices.
In this paper, I will investigate how metaphor can be useful for designer in their daily work: Firstly the procedures of interaction design and within interactive products. I'll start by giving a short overview of metaphor: some chronological views and present position on metaphor, then observe some of the analysis leveled at metaphor in design. The characterization of interaction design I'll use throughout this paper refers to the art of facilitating interactions between humans their agents mediated by products. To a lesser scale, interaction design can also show interactions between humans and immediate or responsive products. By interactions, I basically refer communication, each face to face, one-to numerous, or numerous-to-numerous.
The designer product can creates both digital and analog, objective
or intangible or some combination of these. During this paper writing I'll use the concept of “metaphor” to mean a linguistic, afterward in this paper, I will discuss feature how a metaphor works and constructed. But just put, a metaphor is “a device for seeing something in terms of something else. It brings out the thisness of that or the thatness of a” (Burke, 1945). I will use quotes, theories, and dissociations that linguists to specific metaphors, for example subject is referrer, workspace is Desktop to designate the metaphor of workspace like a desktop.
( Saffer,2005)
Background
conventional Views on Metaphor
The in early 70s, metaphor was consider by most Language scholars to be an odd part of speech, a sensitive flourish that was simply pleasing to the era's language.
The word “metaphor” was defined as a novel or poetic linguistic expression where one or
more words for a concept are used outside of their normal conversation meaning to express a similar concept (Lakoff, 1993).
Metaphors were seen as “abnormal” and needed to be explained in terms Of “normal” language usage (Ortony, 1993). In fact, metaphors were in general seen as sentence structure, to be used for particular metaphoric purposes. Metaphor,
it was attention, got in the way of conservative language and the “exact” world,
this could be appreciated fully without metaphor. Languages scholars
such as John R. Seale observe that metaphors could only be implicit by starting
with the accurate meaning, then comparing it to the metaphorical meaning,
creating a literal-metaphorical divide that later linguists would reproach.
on the conventional line of philosophy was from Kenneth Burke. Burke, in books like Permanence and Change (1935) and “The Four Master Tropes” (1945), recognized correctly that metaphor is about observation, about how we analysis things. “To consider X from the point of view of Z is, of course, to use Z as a perspective upon A” (1945). To transform the metaphor is to change how we identify its subject. As I will explain later in the paper, this is a powerful instrument for designers. Burke even goes advance, “employing an idea that would later be taken up by linguists and cognitive psychologists: that we establish the character of something by approaching it (via metaphor) through a variety of perspectives” (1945). That is, we greatest understand a thing by theoretically comparing it to other possessions.(Saffer,2005)
Problem definition
The Current View on Metaphor
In 1970s, many languages scholars started to acknowledge that metaphor was not only specific common but associated to thought and action. Definitely, they argue that “our conceptual system…is fundamentally metaphoric in nature” (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). In accumulation, generally metaphor is not about languages at all, but fairly about idea. “In the way that we conceptualize one domain in terms of the other” (Lakoff, 1993). Metaphors are very common, with thousands of areas being “mapped” to other domains. (Note that it is nearly very difficult to talk about metaphor—or any other intangible concept—without applying a metaphor. (Saffer,2005).
Reddy was another scholar in his one of essay “The Conduit Article” (1979) who first established by linguistic study that regular English is mainly metaphorical and that we use metaphor to analyze the world. We use metaphor to cause with and thus base our events on. A word, sound, image or used emblematical is likely sketch upon a composite web of links that reproduce how we think and feel about an idea. Intangible concepts such as time, space, states, changes, causation, and actions all of these use in interaction design are all metaphorical in characterizes. We have a tendency to think of time as a “moving forward” and we “put the past behind us.” We feel change and motion linked in change is motion: “He back to what he was doing.” “She fell into a misery.” “He go bald.” Or take variety is motion: “The road bends.” And goes on and on. These aren't work of fiction, graceful conceits; these are regular examples of how people talk and, more significantly, how we as humans think. Metaphor is closely woven into our abstract framework. (Saffer,2005)
Metaphors assist us to imagine and understand intangible concepts like time, typically by making situation to more concrete things (e.g. TIME IS MONEY). Lakoff and Johnson explained that this is generally because we have our bodies that recognize physical experiences and that are tilting in space (1980). In the traditional observation of metaphor, technical “facts” could be described by using “plain” language; no metaphor was wanted. This point is now totally reversed, with metaphors providing not only a means of telling known event, but also to hypothesize about undiscovered event as well (Boyd, 1990). The plan of “cross-domain mapping” is essential to the current view of metaphor. The way we recognize new things is to imagine of them in conditions of things we already know. Metaphors turn out to be natural models that allow us to take well-known, tangible objects and experiences and re-cast them onto unidentified or intangible concepts or things, giving them arrangement and meaning (Erickson, 1991).
Figure 1. A model of cross-domain mapping, after Wulff, Evenson and Rheinfrank, 1990.
Metaphors are used in theoretical ways. It is used to explain “artificial” limits or containers in order to examine about demanding things and to signify non-human entities in terms of being emotions, motivation, personality and activities.
In interaction design the use of metaphor is hardly without debate, however with most of the valuation leveled at using metaphors within products and philosophy of metaphor in the familiar way. As will be in depth later in this paper, metaphor has and can be used successfully within products. For interaction designer metaphor's usage is not only insufficient. Before products are uneven, unworkable designers can use metaphor during their designing process.
Theoretical work
“It is not the role of metaphor to draw our sight to
what is there, but to draw our vision toward what is not there and, indeed, cannot be anywhere. Metaphor
is horizontal, reminding us that it is one's vision that is limited, and not what one is viewing.” - James Carse
Metaphor & Design Process
Metaphor is oblivious part of our daily life. But it can be used in a planned manner. As a means for designers during design process. Metaphor is becoming more practice for the design of products and services.
Redefining “Problems”
There's a very famous old joke between software developers. When something works in an unpredicted, but strangely valuable way, the developers often kid, “Oh, that's not a bug. That's a feature.” And hence a problem gets redefined in other, more optimistic terms. While this is just a joke, designers can use the same practice of using a metaphor to redefine a problem area when tackling design issues. In fact, there's an old gag among designers: “It's not a problem. It's an opportunity.” In past a designer usually gets caught up in a project, a business usually classifies a problem or an apparent problem. A recent product isn't selling well. An opponent has launched an improved product. A latest market has opened up and products require being imaginary for that market. This “crisis” becomes the basis for concerning a designer. (Saffer,2005)
There is a trend to think that problems are permanent, that they spiral from natural, societal, or economic services in forms that can be identified, discussed, and finally solved. Businesses then take on designers to find the best answer to fit the constraints of this given problem space (Simon, 1969). The problem is that problems are not always fixed. They are creature constructs, formed as responses to difficult and disturbing situations (Schön, 1979). They are formed by a practice that Donald Schön calls naming and framing.
Things are selected for attention and named
in such a way as to fit the frame constructed
for the situation. Together the two processes
construct a problem out of the vague and
indeterminate reality that John Dewey
(1938) called the “problematic situation.” …
They select for attention few salient features
and relations from what would otherwise be
an overwhelmingly complex reality (Schön 1979).
Naming and framing often occur via metaphor. Schön uses the Very good example of an inner-city housing project. The housing project as a “blight on the community and a disease that must be cured.” Once these metaphors were in position the “solution” seemed apparent: blights should be impassive and disease should be cured (Schön 1979). Metaphor if understood by any designer can easily adjust the identification and faming but also fixes those might mean. Like software developer joke, shifting the essential metaphor of the “difficult situation” can change not only recent feelings about the position, but also the outcome of the condition. A product that is “a total catastrophe” in fact needs much work than one that is “imperfect,” even though the quantity of work may in fact be the same. If viewed from different viewpoint of problematic situations can reveal solutions or extra opportunities. In the case of the housing project, idea of it as “a folk community,” even if unclearly condescending, still permissible for unusual outcomes other than simply removing the “blight” when Addressing the circumstances. Lets take a example, think a worried ecommerce website that is not doing an efficient job selling there products. Conventionally, ecommerce web sites are thinking of as a spot of purchase: WEBSITE IS STORE and the troubles are viewed as problems of sales the sign out process are unusable, for example). But solutions to the problem of the site may jump from looking at the site another way: WEBSITE IS just a DISPLAY or WEBSITE as an INFORMATION hub.(Saffer,2005)
Metaphor as a Research Tool
Being a designer, one of the jobs is the complexity of working in unusual subject areas. The Designers are compel into those areas where they have small to no background understanding. Usually, the way to conquer, this is to exploit the help of a focus area professional. But this too can be tricky, as the expert may have too greatly acquaintance and things that seem observable to him or her are not as clear to the designer. (Saffer,2005)
An interchange method is used for metaphor to discover the subject matter. While metaphor is logically use to plot the unknown domains. It is practical to argue that it can be harnessed and used straight toward any incident in need of greater explication (Shank and Gleber, 2002). Designer takes a common domain and operates its characteristics to get the similarities and differences between common domain and unusual domain. This was done successfully by a designer team in University of Sussex. As comprehensive in “Making Tea: Iterative Design Through Analogy” (2004), the design team was given responsibility to design a digital lab book system for university chemists. None of the designers, on the other hand, knew anything as regards to chemistry or how chemists works the lab , so they employed a metaphor, TEA IS CHEMISTRY, in order to study chemistry and how chemists works the lab. The designers had the chemists prepare tea as however it was a chemistry conduct experiment and thus were able to begin to recognize chemistry throughout its differences and similarities to tea. (Saffer,2005)
Metaphor as Inspiration
It has been hypothesise that new ideas are almost always due to the
combination or recombination of ideas (Koestler, 1964). Designers can intentionally create recombination throughout of metaphor as a brainstorming method. In fact, this is perhaps the easiest and one of the most successful ways for designers to squeeze metaphor use. All metaphors are, in logic juxtapositions in that two unusual Things are put collectively to create that highlights (and hides) unusual characteristics of each. Discovery any inherent a metaphor in the problem space is thus probably a useful action. Thomas Erickson recommends designers focus on recognize user problems, and then look for real-world events, objects, and institutions that represent some of the characteristics that users find hard to understand (1989).
But nearly any metaphor, even a subjective one, can start new ways of thinking as regards to product or new solutions to a design problem. Certainly some times subjective juxtaposition can be the best method of brainstorming (Saffer,2005)
The human mind cannot tolerate a meaning vacuum. If we compare some X to Y, then we strive mightily to understand that comparison. Sometimes the comparison is simple and transparent. When we compare, say, a smile to a flower, then it is easy to abduce that the smile is pretty and pleasant much as a flower is pretty and pleasant. When we make such simple abductions, then we are staying well within our current range of preconceptions about the meaning of things in the world. When our metaphors are arbitrary, however, then we are no longer in “safe preconceptual territory. There is no easy and apparent solution to the metaphor “puzzle.” Also, even though we know that the comparison is arbitrary, we still feel the tug of our desire to render the comparison
as meaningful. Therefore, we have no choice but to leave our familiar preconceptions and engage in meaning exploration (Shank and
Gleber, 2002).
As is detailed in the book Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and
the Dawn of the Computer Age, the whole notion of what a computer is
and is able of doing gradually but radically changed once the designers and engineers at Xerox PARC start to think of computers not as calculators or a
tools of programming, but instead as communication devices (Hiltzik, 1999).
Metaphor as a Communication Device
Once designs views are created, the first step in design process is selling those ideas to those people who will put into practice the design. Designer can use those created metaphors as a communication means to convey concepts to the other members of their project team. Once there is buy-in on these metaphors, they can act as link between different tram members. Shared metaphors can help in to organized social groups and their limitations, creating a team characteristics and a great communication between team members on an assignment. Having a shared metaphor helps to keep up a common perceptive of a project and makes it easier to discuss compromises as the pressures of users, clients, technology, timing, budget, and governmental pressures boost throughout a project (Stubblefield, 1998).
Metaphor during Product Development
It's not an overemphasis to say that the process of designing products especially digital products is riddle with metaphor. Certainly, the term “computer” initially referred to a human being who designed only afterward was it made into a metaphor: MACHINE IS A COMPUTER. The programming “languages”. “And lest designers think that metaphors are restricted to engineers and programmers, we apply “brushes” to create “strokes” on the “page” which is a “landscape” view. We “crop” metaphors, add more “lead” to lines and change the “face” of type. We make style “bold” and have objects “bleed” off the frame of a page. And so on. Other difficult products in addition to computers are also developed and create using metaphor to explain, understand, assemble, and communicate about their machinery. Electrical systems with their “positive” and “negative” etc. are metaphoric. Telecommunications similarly has its metaphors—“calling” and call “waiting,” etc.” (Saffer,2005)
Design Process is a Metaphor Itself
It stands to basis that, as a theoretical entity itself, the design process would become a center for metaphors to help construct boundaries, as well as to realize and to reason about. In “Use of Narrative in Interactive Design” (2004), the authors display this by applying a metaphor to the design process (THE DESIGN PROCESS IS A STORY). By doing so, designers can not only regenerate their creative processes, but also create more similar products as well.
As we've seen, metaphor is used throughout the design process, both deliberately
and unconsciously, and can yet be a means of reshaping the design process
itself. But metaphor is also widely used throughout interactive products,
in a range of ways. It is to this usage that we now turn our interest.
Part III: Metaphor in Products
cd
“You don't see something until you have the right
metaphor to let you perceive it.” - Robert Shaw
ba
Much of the metaphors disapproval was in design bas on the use of metaphor within products. Incontestably, companies have further onto users all sorts of bastardly metaphors, stuffing accessible functionality keen on rough and awkward metaphors. Yet, when used properly, they can be a powerful tool for conceptualizing, and characterizing products.
Metaphor as a Conceptual Framework
Designers can take metaphors and use them as the stimulating force in projects unlike, say, Microsoft's BOB, in which a metaphor (COMPUTER IS A HOUSE) was honestly placed on top of existing usefully new interactions or styles of interactions are being investigate via metaphoric method Metaphors are at the
center of these projects. An example of this is a project done with HP Labs called “Friction in Scheduling and Coordinating Lives in Families” (2004). The designers used the metaphor FRICTION IS A CONNECTOR to constrain their design.
Previous uses of metaphors in design have focused on object metaphors guiding the shape of products and their associated actions…In our approach, we take not
an object, but a property (“friction”) as metaphorical, and explore the similarities
between the unfamiliar situation (lifestyles) and familiar areas of technology (mechanical friction). Used as a conceptualization device, such metaphors serve to suggest questions and generate miniature “research programs” (Hoefnagels, Geelhoed, Stappers, et al, 2004)
When they are not together, the family members can interact concurrently with a shared appointment through rotating the rim on their watch…force feedback
indicates the difficulty in adjusting the appointment. Through distributed haptic interaction, the family members literally feel one another…This enables them to
express emotions about the change, for example to resist, “counter-rotate,” when being disgruntled about the change in
appointment. Friction again becomes tangible (2004).
The designers used the character of friction (counter-force) and apply it to their development devices, creating, for example, a wristwatch that represents these characteristics:
“
Artifacts of the Presence Area” is another application that is design based on a metaphor: DATA IS GEOLOGY. Based in Boston's Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA), this application recorded guests, their movements, and the surrounding noise of the space to generate a record of a three-month time period (January- April 2003). “In trying to transmit a sense of historical increase over time, it made sense to look at natural examples of enlargement for inspiration. The geological layers in resembling rocks and their function as record keepers provided us with such an example” (Viegas, Perry, Howe, and Donath, 2004).
Picture 2. A sample from MIT's Media Labs' “Artifacts of the Presence Era,” 2003.
The designers produced the piece so that museum visitors were able to
move all the way through layers of the history like “archaeologists,” rotating a simple dial to move chronologically through the data, “excavating” the traces left by previous visitors (2004).
Defining Spaces and Structure via Container Metaphors
Things are complex to understand without boundaries. Metaphor has been used to classify spaces and boundaries in places where there actually are none (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980), yet within mediums. The digital time itself a metaphor, due to its extensive and indefinable nature, has been mainly ripe for this kind of metaphoric usage, frequently in clusters of related metaphors. A collection OF digital DATA IS A FILE and A collection OF FILES IS A FOLDER, for example. The internet has cause many of these container metaphors: INTERNET IS AN sea (e.g. “I'm surfing the web”), \ INTERNET IS A LIBRARY (“he is browsing that website”) set OF HTML DOCUMENTS IS A PLACE (a web “page”), HTML DOCUMENT IS A BOOK (“Web site”) and of course INTERNET IS A WEB. Lacking these structuring metaphors, users would fast become confused. Designers should to be responsive of these structures or generate them if nothing are available. The desktop metaphor would be a very intangible concept if the working system didn't resemble an actual desktop.
In additional words, products need forms and designers have to either find them or
create them. Metaphor is one of great way doing this.
Using Metaphor to Orient
Related to the commands of metaphoric limitations is the ability to move during space and even time using metaphor. Once a space is defined there
usually needs to be some technique of figuring out where one is in that
space and how one can move about if required. Web pages “link” collectively and
use “bread crumbs” to demonstrate how a user can shift “back” or “up” in the
site's hierarchy. 3D software applications use metaphors drawn from brief to
navigate: yaw, field, and roll. For community in Western cultures who read left-to-
right, the metaphors LEFT IS back and RIGHT IS ahead are often used in
products, as experienced by the left-pointed “back button” on browsers to go back to the previous web page or on the buttons of media players to move ahead
or back in the music tracks. (Strangely, some mobile phone companies like Nokia
break this metaphor.)
This kind of orientation using metaphor is essential for users to be able
to investigate the product space and learn the features and option
therein. user must orient themselves with a product, to use product
effectively.
Operational Metaphors
Events can also be metaphors, substituting for additional operations. Opening a flip-top of the cell phone answers the phone the same as pressing the answer
buttons in cell phone. Passed out a file to the Recycle Bin can is the same as
deleting the file by pressing the delete button. Modifier buttons example
(Control-C/Command-C for Cut) are metaphors for events typically done using
pull-down option.
As new digital products move ahead of computers and devices, we can
wait for to see a lot of these operational metaphors. One can make up
pantomiming revolving a key to open a door equipped with a digital lock,
for example.
Using Metaphor to Personify Products
Metaphors can provide machines and lifeless objects with human
personality, making them more friendly and usable. These types of metaphors “allow us to make sense of phenomena in the world in human terms—terms we can understand on the basis of our own motivations, goals, actions, and characteristics” (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). In products, this can be done in a very accurate way, by using a humanoid agent interact directly to uses (PRODUCT IS A PERSON), or, more subtly, by using individual character of humans. Most applications, for example, a simple dialog box in which this application act like a human being and communicate user direct questions when a problem is come across (HUMAN-COMPUTER INTERACTION AS CONVERSATION).
Metaphor can also be effective to reveal complex, non-human actions as simpler, human ones using personification. Computers don't “read” data from disk. Telephones don't “receive” phone calls. MP3 players don't “play” music. But because we can use a metaphor to characterize these actions, we can understand in better way what our products are doing.
Using Metaphor to Introduce New Concepts
Since one of metaphor's main applications is to use the familiar to investigate the unfamiliar, one of the key and the most applied reasons to use
metaphors are their power to launch new concepts to users. At its top, this can cause incredible psychological leaps, like the ones made at the form of the desktop User Interface and the browser. At its nastiest, it can entrap users into a metaphor that unclear more than it illuminates, that causes rage and irritation, and that in some cases can cause harm or death clearly, this is the part of metaphor use that is the mainly filled with risk, for metaphor both show and hide. Some uniqueness of both the metaphor's focus and the objective are highlighted while others are unseen. This can cause major problems of understanding when the target doesn't act like its focus or visa versa, each in having more abilities or in having a smaller amount. But, as we've seen, this is how we as humans often, obviously, and without thinking use metaphor: as a way of cross-domain mapping. If designers do not explain metaphors for beginning users, then users will pass their individual metaphors to bear on new domain, and these metaphors may or may not be sufficient or correct. To not present if metaphors seems an abdication of the designer's liability. The perils of via metaphors are discussed in the next part, as are procedure for correct use of metaphor.
Part IV: Using Metaphor Appropriately
“Life is described in one of four ways: a journey,
a battle, a pilgrimage, or a race. Select your own
metaphor, but the necessity of finishing is all
the same.” - from The War Cry
metaphor is a vast and risky tool if used improperly. But it cant be throw out because it is risky. It should be used with little care and wisdom while using it in interaction design. But this is not by any way a universally held judgment; there has been much censure of using metaphor in design at all.
Criticism of Metaphor in Interaction Design
a great deal of the criticism that has been leveled in opposition to the use of metaphor in interaction design is associated to the traditional vision of metaphor
and is paying attention primarily on the use of metaphor in digital products. Some
have gone as far to say that using metaphors is a “trap” that leads to busted interfaces and cognitive strain on users (Hutchinson, 1997). Alan Cooper has been one of the most loud opponents of using metaphor in interaction design.
Searching for that guiding metaphor is like
searching for the correct steam engine
to power your airplane, or searching for a
good dinosaur on which to ride to work…
I think basing a user interface design on
a metaphor is not only unhelpful but can
often be quite harmful. The idea that
good user interface design is based on
metaphors is one of the most insidious of
the many myths that permeate the software
community (Cooper, 1995).
The study of metaphor in interaction design can be divided intointo five areas:
- The physicality of the object that is being evaluated to cannot be matched by the more intangible subject. This leads to people using the intangible object imperfectly because they imagine it can do things that the physical item can. You cannot, for example, clear your virtual desktop with one take as you could with your analog one. Metaphors are confusing and allow for artificial affordances (Mohnkern, 1997).
2) The conceptual object has more goods than the more physical object does and, by using a metaphor, users of the conceptual object will be unaware of the goods that aren't reflected in the physical object. A digital file folder, for example, can do lots of more things (e.g. reproduce itself, be in more then one places at once, etc.) than
can its analog.
3) Metaphors do not measure well. even if current features of a system may all work in one umbrella metaphor, new features may not fit and have to be sick or warped to fix the existing metaphor.
4) Metaphors humiliate over time. They become out of date and lose importance and power. THE Personal computuer WORKSPACE IS A DESKTOP metaphor has been approximately for over twenty years as of this script.
5) Metaphors are boring as a design tool. While they may help basic understand a system, they quickly move into more advanced users (Cooper, 1995). These analyses are fair. Because of the methodical nature of metaphor, using it to understand one thing in terms of the other will hide or difficult to understand other aspects of the thought. in focusing on one aspect of a thought, we may not see other essentials of the concept that are
incompatible with that metaphor (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). No one could
reject that metaphor has sometimes been unoriginal in products. Microsoft's
BOB, is an example which used the metaphor COMPUTER IS A HOUSE,
. Each element of the operating system had to be press into this metaphor.
Calendars on walls start calendar applications, And on and on.
Picture 3. Microsoft's BOB, 1995.
Why Use Metaphor?
as I have displayed the uses of metaphors in products can be helpful or horrible interference. The use of metaphor in interaction design can be very strong and valuable but it can be very strong and valuable but it can also explode in deigner face and cause long -term consequences. So why one risk using it? The first explanation is that we as humans can't help out it. As Reddy and Lakoff and Johnson and many others explained, metaphors are element of cognitive processing. We use them to make common sense of the world; thus we use them to make common sense of the things in our world and in the products we use and generate. Even if it was probable to make a product without via metaphor, users would get their own metaphors to allow on it. This is how we understand stuff: by evaluating them to other things. Some would dispute that it is best to let users produce their own metaphors for products. While surely this will
occur anyhow, especially with specialist users, beginner users may choose an even
worse metaphor than the good designer, who most probably knows the product
better than the beginner users . To depart it up to the users is to give up design responsibility.
The second cause is that there are a few number of ways to change viewpoint. Of Burke's Four Master Tropes (metaphor, synecdoche, metonymy, and irony), metaphor has hence far showed to hold the most power and litheness for interaction designers. It can be useful to many different phases of the process and in all unusual types of products. Because of its deep lay in our language and ideas, metaphor is also the most gladly presented and therefore the most normal to use in a different situations. In the last is that metaphor's power to change is too powerful a tool to disregard. If all development comes from the combination of two unlike objects, then metaphor is at the heart of creation. And since creation is at the feeling of Design as well, it stands to motivation that metaphor itself is at the heart of Design as well.
A Tool to Change Behavior
The object of interaction design isn't just to perfect machine behavior;
eventually it is to control or change the behavior (with anticipation for the better) of the users product's. Whether this is given that them with pertinent information at the most applicable time so that they can make up to date decisions, making their work easier, or even just engaging them, the goal is the similar, and the metaphoric optional to a designer makes can directly command this actions, for good or bad. With the exemption of use during brainstorming method, designers have to be careful of the metaphoric selection they make.
How a user respond to a product, and therefore to the surroundings
in which the this product lives in, can be greatly subjective by the original
metaphor. unfortunate or unfamiliar metaphors can be root errors, anger, disturbance, or disappointment. BANKING IS A GAME might be a foolish and hazardous metaphor to use for a teller machine. Using MEDICAL DEVICE IS A Boom is possible a wrong metaphoric pick, primary to terrified patients and health care employees. MP3 PLAYER IS MAGIC will perhaps lead to various misunderstandings on how the device works. computer unit IS A DESKTOP metaphor has created how computers have been in used primarily as an office instrument. certainly, it could be represent that the desktop metaphor has caught up the development of ubiquitous PC as much as a few hardware factors. The desktop metaphor also likely caught up non-knowledge workers from adoptingcomputers as well. As John Brock in a few words put it, “If you don't have a
desktop, then the desktop metaphor doesn't connect” (1996). preferably, a suitable metaphor can take a tough or nfriendly situation and make it fewer so. The acceptance of computers move up after the desktop metaphor renew the previous metaphor (PC IS A PROGRAMMING ENVIRONMENT). Digital Video Recorders (DVRs) have quickly changed the means their users watch and control television by varying the metaphor of television from TELEVISION IS A watercourse to TELEVISION IS product, which in spin has changed the performance of both the television networks in the way schedule
shows and television adds in how they add there products. Similarly, DSL was a
unsuccessful technology until the phone companies altered the metaphor from
DSL IS A just SERVICE which had to be installed by technicians to DSL IS A
PRODUCT and on track selling it as such, total with do-it-yourself kits. Once DSL
became a “thing,” its adoption soared to millions of users.
Guidelines for Metaphor Usage
As we've seen, metaphor is a great but potentially risky tool for
designers. So how can designers use it correctly? Some guiding
principle are below:
• Metaphors are cultural.
Every culture has unusual conceptual frameworks, mainly about intangible ideas like time. Be cognizant of differences when selecting metaphors that distance multiple cultures. And not only are metaphors culturally-unambiguous, they
can as well be limited to specific audiences in that culture. If you don't know about a desktop, the desktop metaphor can be pointless to you.
• Metaphors are contextual.
Be attentive of the perspective in which the metaphor is being used. What can done the trick in on medium or domain may not do so somewhere else. except you are intentionally juxtaposing for outcome, metaphors in a product must fit the perspective in which they will be used. The theme matter of most projects will possible be rich with its own metaphors. discovery and utilizing them can create powerful connections among the product and its perspective of use.
• Fit the metaphor to the functionality, not the other way
around.
Metaphor should be a instrument to help users understand Unfamiliar content and functionality. So while using a metaphor in a product, establish with the new, unfamiliar matter you have and create that the theme of the metaphor, not the referrer. Uncomfortable situations are more likely to take place when
functionality is accommodate into a metaphor. In the best case, metaphors should hold concepts, not be real supported by concepts or concept.
• Use metaphor to uncover otherwise hidden aspects of the material.
While BANKING IS A FUN may be an unsuitable metaphor when used within a product, it might be a powerful metaphor to use through concept progress to show what banking is not. And even maybe is.
• Discard process metaphors when necessary.
Metaphors that have been used in brainstorming method or during the design process method can develop controlled or simply be unsuitable for users. In some cases, it is better to have no metaphor at all than an unsuitable one.
• Don't let your metaphor ruin key features.
Designers need to understand that all metaphors can difficult to understand as much as they illuminate and they must decide their metaphors so as to not difficult to understand or distort key features. Microsoft's recycling bin in Windows XP is cute, but is less clear than a junk can or a dumpster would be.
• Choose metaphors that are appropriately scalable.
The desktop metaphor will lasted as long as it will because it balance very well. Many different tasks fit well into its structure. Likewise, the folder metaphor. Other metaphoric selection (an packet instead of a folder, say) might not have scaled hence well.
• Let your metaphors degrade and die.
Once an suitable metaphor is understood, it becomes almost dead, only to suit apparent again with attempt. even while this has been criticized, this is a good thing, as halfway and superior users should not have to worry overmuch by the metaphor and deal other directly with the basic material. It is only wrong metaphors that carry on to hinder more qualified users. This is, in fact, a good analysis for whether or not a metaphor is suitable.
Epilogue: The End of the Desktop Metaphor?
The desktop metaphor has been commercially present almost over 20 years and has affected computers for excellent and bad ever since. Every year, it seems, somebody predicts the end of the desktop, and yet it continues to hang on. And there's a good cause for that: it's powerful, reasonably flexible, and allows for a different applications to be integrated into it. As our devices get smaller in size and more ubiquitous, yet, the desktop metaphor seems too heavy to move to handheld devices, cell phones, and environments. metaphors have not only fit their functionality, but also their atmosphere as well. It's as strange to think having a mobile phone GUI on a computer on large monitor as it is in the opposite direction. So then what will substitute the desktop metaphor? As we've seen, it's not possible to understand the intangible and complex digital devices we have openly. therefore, what will substitute the desktop metaphor will be…anothermetaphor. maybe it will be a cityscape or a room or somewhat less real.
anything it is, it will hopefully source us to make an additional cognitive leap, like
the desktop metaphor initially did, and show us new potential and a different future.
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