Some rambling on metaphor, product design, and consulting

Life is not actually a game of baseball. There is a danger in metaphor. In a metaphor. If you have a single way of looking at a problem, you may not even realize that you are in the thrall of a metaphor.

I help entrepreneurs create new products. I am fond of the product is a game metaphor. I offered it to a client, and he loved it. Too much. I spent much of my time trying to diffuse his enthusiasm for product is a game, because I felt that he was dwelling on it too much. What had been extremely useful to me became something that I hated.

My goal is to explore how to see things from multiple perspectives, to learn new ways of seeing things, and to see new things, things that we didn't even realize were there.

Metaphors are hard to dislodge, often because they come to appear almost self-evident. I thought that my problem was with metaphor, but I really had a problem with a metaphor, and I now know how to deal with a single metaphor: introduce more metaphors!

The power of a metaphor is that it is a way of thinking about, a way of seeing something. And there is a power in seeing something in terms of more than metaphor, from more than one perspective.

When you're out there, casting about for a way to wrap your head around a problem, don't be content to find a single guiding metaphor. Look for two. Or three!

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Nov 10, 2009

parkview said...

It's fairly difficult to distinguish, ultimately, between metaphorical and non-metaphorical ways of thinking. A 'visual' metaphor forms the spine of this post--'looking' and 'seeing'--but it's certainly not a threat to your getting your meaning across. Of course, as Whorf nicely demonstrated, metaphorical thinking *can* have dangerous--even explosive!--consequences.

Edwin Watkeys said...

Metaphor has occupied me for the last year, and I have become perhaps debilitatingly aware of the metaphors I and others use without even being aware of them. (Metaphor has _occupied_ me? Like, umm, taking up space in me?) Reading Pinker's _The Stuff of Thought_, particularly the chapter that starts with the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence, was a life changing experience on the order of reading _The Collapse of Chaos_ or Alexander's _The Timeless Way of Building_.

I use metaphor loosely: models, schema, metaphors. All the same thing: anything that says, this is what something _is_, this is the way you should think about it; I consider any such thing a metaphor.

I am not familiar with the Whorf reference. Which is odd, given that – while I am _not_ a Trekkie – I _have_ seen every episode of every ST series and every movie.

Hah, Benjamin Lee Whorf is an intellectual progenitor to Pinker et al. (You're making me wonder whether there's a Trekkie connection now though) You may have heard of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. I think you'd like Whorf. He was an extremely prolific 'gentleman scholar'--the kind of public intellectual figure we don't have much anymore in America--who addressed some of the same concerns that interest you. Here's the reference to an essay in which he describes some of his work as a fire-insurance inspector: http://bit.ly/21sOHw

D'oh! I have heard of that hypothesis — typing from the iPhone now, please excuse the brevity — but it's been a while. I'll give the essay a read at my earliest convenience. Thanks!

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"What he has to show us is indeed a long way off, and perhaps concerns us little, but all truth is valuable and all knowledge pleasing in its first effects, and may subsequently be useful." -- Dr Johnson

Bits and Bikes

Some rambling on metaphor, product design, and consulting

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