What’s In A Name?
Idioms, Metaphors, and Design
Elizabeth Churchill
Yahoo! Research | elizabeth@elizabethchurchill.com
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