Metaphor and Analogy in Design

Instructor

Kim Erwin

“We must all bend like the willow in the wind.”

Why does this image persist decades after my sixth grade teacher offered it to us after recess was canceled? Perhaps because, like all effective metaphors, it offers a simultaneously compact and vivid communication, conveying insight intuitively in ways that long, logical explanations cannot. Good metaphors are powerful and persistent. We use them every day. As designers, metaphors have a special role to play in our practice, as we:

• explain new ideas in familiar terms
The ‘desktop’ interface revolutionized computer usage, taking it out of the hands of experts and making it cognitively accessible to millions. The ‘horseless carriage’ and the ‘cordless phone’ also connected totally new technologies to existing models of use.

• guide innovation, helping us break from convention when planning solutions
Bio-mimicry is transforming how some scientists conceive of solutions to human problems by looking to nature’s models for inspiration or imitation.

• simplify complex systems
Airlines dramatically reduced the complexity of their routes by adopting the wheel model—the hub and spoke system—to manage its fleet and flight schedule.

• reframe a course of action so as to ‘rally the troops’ and prompt purposeful action
In the mid to late 1980s, then-senator Al Gore successfully used the term “data superhighway”—and later “information superhighway”—to secure the attention of the press and lead funding initiatives in Congress that increased investment in a national computer networking infrastructure that we know today as the Internet.

Metaphors, analogies, similies, allegories, metonymies and other visual/verbal devices have fascinated cognitive scientists, therapists, politicians and speechwriters because they have the power to transform the way people think, and how they act in response. They allow large amounts of information to be assimilated, ideas conveyed, alternative perspectives to be experienced and new inferences to be drawn. Skilled use of metaphor and analogy is tricky, but as designers and design planners we need to understand these powerful tools in a more technical manner and build our expertise in applying them.

In this course, we will:
1. define metaphors, analogies, metonyms—and other variations on the theme—so that we might round out our of understanding of what’s possible;
2. survey various approaches to and sources of metaphors and analogies, noting the principles that make for effective ones and postulating which approach works best in a given circumstance, so that we have a breadth of examples to draw from.
3. make some of our own; there’s nothing like practice to build skill.

Format & Grading

This class will be conducted as part lecture, part workshop. Your discussion and presentation of ideas is critical, to both the success of the overall classroom environment and to your grade.