Designer’s love metaphors. I was recently working with an organizational design firm, one that uses design principles to help change companies from the inside out, and noticed their absolute love of metaphors. One particularly interesting metaphor was likening a large corporation made of a bunch of tiny corporations to a restaurant or open food market. This was used to gain understanding of a very complex system. That’s one of the great uses of a metaphor: no one can fully understand a system of inter-related organizations that span billions of dollars and several countries, but everyone can understand an open food market and how all of the food stands need to work together to attract customers and not pull each other down through competition. This created a solid shared understanding of the whole and created a language for change.
This was a case where a metaphor was used for understanding… a mental shortcut to something more complex and less digestible.
The other use of the metaphor for the designer is for inspiration. You can google interaction relabeling, but it is one such technique where you ask questions like “what if this trackpad where a rifle?” It’s a terrible example, but you get the picture. designers use metaphors to relate two disparate objects as a way of creating something new.
So you have two basic uses of a metaphor:
- Metaphors for memory and understanding
- Metaphors for inspiration and innovation
The problem i have with metaphors was most eloquently and originally attributed to albert einstein. He basically said everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. Or rather:
It can scarcely be denied that the supreme goal of all theory is to make the irreducible basic elements as simple and as few as possible without having to surrender the adequate representation of a single datum of experience.
Which to my ears illustrates the power and the danger of metaphors in one sentence. Yes, they create understanding, but at what cost? I have no problem with using a metaphor for inspiration, but when reducing a complex system of inter-related corporations, or a system of two parents and two children, when is our reductionist use of metaphors becoming very similar to the reductionist attitudes of other professions, turning massive amounts of data about real living people into spreadsheet tables? Can an open food market really express the system of companies fully? What data is left behind? What are the metaphor remainders?
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