What’s In A Name?
Idioms, Metaphors, and Design
Elizabeth Churchill
Yahoo! Research | [e-mail]

David Gartner

January + February 2008

“I’ll wall you,” someone teased me the other day. If you do, I’ll poke you, I retorted. We both laughed. The person sitting next to us looked mystified. I proceeded to try and explain that no, my friend wasn’t going to come to my house with a spray-paint can and personally annotate a wall. And no, I wasn’t going to reach over with my bony index finger and prod him in the side.

Give it a shot: Explain to someone who has never been on a social-networking site, much less used Facebook, what it means to “write on my wall” or to “poke” someone. A lot of words, several dubious analogies, and a couple of wobbly metaphors later, I gave up, got my laptop out, and proceeded to demonstrate—to show him just why writing that thing feels like such a threat, and why my poking back lacks firepower. To be honest, it isn’t even clear to me if being poked is a good or bad thing. But, by “walling me” with that comment, my friend was essentially saying he would embarrass me publicly by sharing something mind-bendingly silly with all the folks who are my Facebook friends.

Walls, poking, and friendship… This all got me thinking about communication—in particular about the language we use when naming the human-computer-human interactions we design, and more generally, about idioms, metaphors, and idiomatic rea-

soning. And about metaphorical memes, shared understandings thereof (or not), and the actions that invite, inspire, and imply.

It has been argued that our conceptual system, the terms in which we think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. Idioms, metaphors, and similes are evocative. They describe one thing in terms of another, enhancing our conceptualization—often of both things. Telling someone they look like a bulldog licking mustard off a thistle or that they look like a shaved monkey reflected in a spoon is going to make you think differently, even if only for a second and only for humorous effect.

Similes, analogies, and idioms sometimes spring from experiences with technology. Some are easy to trace. “Don’t stand there like one o’clock half struck,” my mother used to say to me. (Think about it.) Some idioms stand the test of time; to burn the candle at both ends has been a warning for decades, probably longer. The blocks didn’t fall right is readily understood to mean something did not work out as planned, even to people who have never played Tetris, whence the idiom purportedly derives.

Sometimes idioms converge conceptually despite their divergent sources. All singing, all dancing, and fully loaded—one idiom in performance, the other in capacity, but now they are used interchangeably in conversation.

In technology design, metaphors are also often used to nudge people to act in certain ways. The desktop metaphor is a well-known example—the use of documents, files, and folders as pointers to… documents, files and folders. In 1999, Bill Hibbard, emeritus senior scientist at the Space Science and Engineering Center, articulately invited us at ACM’s SIGGRAPH to “find effective visual idioms for direct manipulation user interactions with visualizations” and to “find effective visual idioms for collaborative interactions among multiple users.”

But, there be dragons. Metaphors and analogies underpin our creative leaps, our lateral thinking, our inspirations, but they also constrain us. In lazy moments metaphors become the thing, become reified and reused, confused with fact or rules for design. Scaffolding reasoning through metaphors, similes, and analogies can lead to problems of initial understanding, design rigidity, and overextension, and—perhaps most interestingly for the global world of internet-based interaction and communication—problems of translation and derivation.

To the first point, inevitably there will be breaks in design metaphors. For example, years ago, despite a friend’s insistence that the desktop metaphor interface was “absolutely intuitive,” the metaphor did not immediately