Hi Jo, I was curious about the readership of L&J because my background is in linguistics, so I'm always curious to see if anything we write gets picked up by other disciplines :)
A few points: * L&J is indeed dated (though not nearly as dated as Grice). Infact, it's so dated that I would argue that almost everything insightful to be said about metaphor from a cognitive linguistic perspective has already been said. One of my major problems with metaphor as a research discipline has been that it is so overdone; I can't tell you how many conferences I went to that were filled with "X IS Y: Yet another metaphor" (if I was lucky, it would be about another language). * Your quote Actually, I have read the book and it is informative, but dated. It doesn't > address the issue of metaphors in UIs which are very different from > language > based metaphors, which is why they often fail. > > seems to miss what I believe is L&J's main thesis, which is that metaphors _aren't_ language based, but rather cognition based (and I suppose language instantiated). Metaphor is so deeply ingrained as to be neural - to use my example of POLITICS IS WAR, it's not just that the same neurons fire when we talk about about politics and war, but when we think about politics and war. But I think there's plenty of room for agreement. My last post posited the difference between experiential and explanatory metaphors, the latter being of the L&J flavor, the former being more ad-hoc and thus the product of "creative" IxD. Those are pretty much bound to fail, but finding a good experiential metaphor - though challenging, if not impossible - can be a real boon to an interaction. * Another quote: The act of combining the two literal meanings is the understanding or the > work of > decoding the metaphor. If users aren't given a motivation to decode a new > combination of meanings or an ambiguity, the metaphor will fail. This I have a bit of a problem with, as it employs a metaphor (!) that I don't really agree with, namely the CONDUIT metaphor L&J discuss it). Briefly, this metaphor is about linguistic communication being like a message: a speaker has an idea in his mind, encodes it via the language faculty in his brain, sends it across the wire via speech, the hearer receives this message, decodes it via her linguistic faculty (perhaps correctly, perhaps not), and unpacks a "message". We use this metaphor every day without even thinking about it, and it's dominated Western thought about language for at least 60 years. My problem with it is that it's grossly inaccurate - people use language to DO things. If I tell you a joke, it's because I'm making a social move within a social. This email isn't me trying to get a message across, it's a conversational maneuver to hopefully align you with my worldview. Speech acts have goals that reach far beyond message decoding or trying to get my thoughts into your head. * Getting back to how this impacts IxD, I think it's great that IxDers are skeptical of metaphor and their application (kudos to Will for pointing me to Dan's thesis). But there's a fairly substantial literature in linguistics about how interaction shapes language, and the role of metaphor and cognition could be fruitfully mined for ideas - there are plenty of linguists like myself who think that language inhabits interaction, and plenty who don't (ahem, chomsky, ahem). Linguistics thrives (in my personal view) when it tries to formalize how people speak (from grammar to phonetics) in terms of context. Similarly, I think IxD thrives when it tries to operationalize possible and non-possible interaction patterns. Rather than throwing our hands up when asked about what makes a "good" interaction and saying "It depends!", I think the pattern libraries that are out there illustrate the value of taking a step back and noting the commonalities that show up again and again in human interaction. Yes, applying those patterns takes skill (and are what really makes something "good"), but there are tons of interactions that no one ever adopts, that we wouldn't even say are bad because no human being having grown up in our society would ever conjure them (such as, say, an mp3 player that when picked up, molded to the user's hand). > So, I'm always looking for more ideas in this area (dissertation topics > anyone?), please email me if anything comes to mind or I can share my > hours > of pouring over this literature. > cheers, > Jo > > If you're looking for a pervasive metaphor in HCI, I would highly suggest taking up the CONDUIT metaphor. Reddy (1979) discusses an alternative called the toolmaker's paradigm. It would be really interesting to see how (or if) such a paradigm could be instantiated in IxD, but my guess is that it would be disastrous for users. It would seem to be a great example of how a more "accurate" metaphor yields sub-optimal results. Best, Dave Katten ________________________________________________________________ Welcome to the Interaction Design Association (IxDA)! To post to this list ....... [EMAIL PROTECTED] Unsubscribe ................ http://www.ixda.org/unsubscribe List Guidelines ............ http://www.ixda.org/guidelines List Help .................. http://www.ixda.org/help
