Last semester I took a course at Bentley (Advanced User Interface Design), and read a paper by Alan Blackwell called The Reification of Metaphor as a Design Tool. (Alan F. Blackwell. The Reification of Metaphor as a Design Tool. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, Vol. 13, No. 4, pp. 490-530, 2006.)
I have always had an interest in reified terms (such as the term race, my honors thesis was centered around the reification of the term race), so I was curious to see how the term metaphor is reified as a design tool.
Below is a timeline I put together with information taken from Blackwell’s article. It outlines the origins of metaphor in HCI (Human Computer Interaction) beginning in the 1960s (when computers started becoming a metaphor for human cognitive processes). The gold curve represents the level of concreteness of the use of metaphor as a design tool. The low parts of the curve represent times when metaphor is seen as a theoretical concept, and high parts of the curve is when metaphor is seen as a valid design tool. The golden bar represents the “Golden Age” of the use of metaphor as a design tool (will get into that later).
1960s
Before computers, metaphors for human cognitive processes were clockwork and hydraulics; computers then became a metaphor for human cognitive processes. During this time, computer users were highly specialized domain experts. Computer users were in fact those who were researching computer science, therefore HCI metaphors during this time reflected the generalized concepts of computer researchers and designers. A popular metaphor during this time is that computers represent human mental processes—clearly only people who researched human mental processes (like cognitive psychologists) could grasp this metaphor.
1970s
Art has an impact on metaphor, and visual metaphors start to become popular in HCI. HCI is also impacted by cognitive theories in education, which starts to look into creative mental processes (mainly the cognitive processes that depict images/pictures). Therefore computer metaphors are starting to be represented using pictures, images and icons. Metaphor is also starting to become more of a design tool because of these pictorial representations.
1980s
Metaphor starts to become even more of a design tool. This comes after a major shift in primary computer users to office workers. Computer developers came to the realization that computers need to be understood by novice users like office workers. Computer developers needed to come up with metaphors that resonated with a different type of user in that user’s own world. The desktop metaphor is released in the mid-80s, and is highly successful, and to this day is arguably the most successful computer metaphor. Metaphors during this time became the core of designing (the “Golden Age” of metaphors begins in 1985).
1990s
Metaphors start to become problematic after many failed attempts to use metaphor as a design tool (such as Microsoft Bob). The problem here was that metaphors were becoming too literal and less subtle. This presented a problem because novice users tended to attempt to interpret too much from the metaphor, or it didn’t match their mental model of the metaphor exactly. Expert users felt the use of metaphors was condescending.
2000s
The debates continue on the use of metaphor in HCI. It starts to revert back to a theoretical foundation for design, rather than a design tool.
A timeline of the use of metaphor in HCI (click for a bigger image)
I am curious what people think. Is there still a place for metaphor as a design tool in HCI? I would like to argue that there is no place for it because computers themselves have become a real world entity to many novice and expert users, and there is no need to relate our relationship with computers or our interactions with computers to other real world objects. Does anyone have another good example of metaphor as a design tool, that may rival the desktop metaphor?
