Elastic Metaphors: Expanding the Philosophy of Interface Design

Metaphors are generally accepted as essential to the design of effective human computer interfaces. However, “The generally assumed theoretical benefits of user interface metaphor are supported by surprisingly little empirical evidence.” (Blackwell, 1998) This paper discusses the concept of “concrete metaphor” and the problems that it presents in interface and interaction design. Concrete metaphors are composed of objects that users are familiar with from their everyday experience (L'Abbate and Hemmje, 1998). Since we live in a physical world, then it seems natural that computer interfaces should resemble as closely as possible – physical objects. We already know how these devices work, and so a metaphor based on the known should help us to understand the unknown. After all, “The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.” (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980) Certainly, this has been the prevailing school of thought when discussing the application of metaphor to Human Computer Interface (HCI) design. However, there is another school of thought that the use of metaphor is detrimental to HCI design. For example, Halasz and Moran (1982, p. 386) considered analogy as “dangerous when used for detailed reasoning about computer systems this is much better done with abstract conceptual models.” Our argument is that metaphor can be used for the representation and explanation of abstract conceptual models. Recent work by Lakoff and Núňez (2001) describes the notion of conceptual metaphor – a cognitive mechanism that derives abstract thinking from the way we function in the everyday physical world. Copyright (c) 2004, Australian Computer Society, Inc. This paper appeared at the Computing and Philosophy Conference, Canberra. Conferences in Research and Practice in Information Technology, Vol. 37. J. Weckert The new approach towards the application of metaphor to human computer interactions, proposed in this paper, is based on the concept of ‘elastic metaphors’. The paper presents the features of elastic metaphors and methods for its construction.