074 | Metaphors |
A method to investigate how people understand concepts, help them understand in new ways, and generate new ideas
- A metaphor is “a device for seeing something in terms of something else. It brings out the thisness of a that or the thatness of a this.”
- Interaction and product design often use metaphors to introduce people to new ways of doing things, by relating them to familiar ideas.
- Designers can use a process of eliciting the metaphors that people might be—consciously or unconsciously— using to imagine or understand the systems around them, or complex ideas.
- Participatory drawing methods, image collages or mood boards, or even constructing physical models can all help as projective methods to reveal the underlying metaphors, associations, and mental models that people use to make meaning around particular topics or ideas. Analysis of these metaphors can uncover their effects and implications.
Contributed by Dan Lockton
See alsoCreative Toolkits • Generative Research • Picture Cards
New Metaphors is a workshop method where participants juxtapose seemingly unrelated cards to generate novel metaphors for hard-to-visualize phenomena (e.g., Plant Growth as a metaphor for Feeling Overwhelmed).
Courtesy of Dan Lockton
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