[ed. A metaphor designer. Who would've thought something like that would ever be a job title? But today that actually makes a lot of sense.]
If you could ask Dante where he got the idea of life as a road, or Rilke where he found the notion that time is a destroyer, they might have said the metaphors were hewn from their minds, or drawn from a stock of poetic imagery. Their readers might have said the imagery had origins more divine, perhaps even diabolical. But neither poets nor readers would have said the metaphors were designed. That is, the metaphors didn’t target people’s cognitive processes. They weren’t engineered to affect us in a specific way.
Can metaphors be designed? I’m here to tell you that they can, and are. For five years I worked full-time as a metaphor designer at the FrameWorks Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC, whose clients are typically large US foundations (never political campaigns or governments). I continue to shape and test metaphors for private-sector clients and others. In both cases, these metaphors are meant to help people to understand the unfamiliar. They aren’t supposed to make someone remark: ‘That’s beautiful.’ They’re meant to make someone realise that they’ve only been looking at one side of a thing.
Here’s an example. In the 1960s, the US philosopher Donald Schön spent some time at the consulting firm Arthur D Little (he eventually became a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology nearby). He was working with product researchers trying to figure out why a new paintbrush design with synthetic bristles didn’t apply paint smoothly. As Schön related it later, someone in the group suddenly said: ‘A paintbrush is a kind of pump!’
Ordinarily, seeing a paintbrush this way would be considered a mistake. In this case, what the researchers knew about pumps suddenly became available for thinking about paintbrushes too. ‘Paintbrush as pump’ isn’t beautiful, but it’s very useful. It was, as Schön wrote later, ‘a generative metaphor for the researchers in the sense that it generated new perceptions, explanations, and inventions’. (Among other things, it led to new bristle designs that would bend the right way.)
Metaphor designers create these pseudo-mistakes deliberately. Sometimes the metaphors end up in op-eds or public-service announcements. Sometimes they’re useful for helping people conceive of solutions to problems, or for internal communications in organisations. The challenge for the designer is to generate lots of pseudo-mistakes, some of which can be used for thinking and that have the power to stick around. For someone like me who is reflexively metaphorical (my wedding invite was built around the idea of a labyrinth), these are satisfying tasks, and, as a writer, I have no problem leaving material on the cutting room floor. But it’s when we start testing our metaphors for their social and cognitive usability that design can become really powerful. (...)
That said, you do have to be careful with emotional responses. I worked on a project about childhood resilience. The question was how do children turn out well despite difficult circumstances? We had become acquainted with the metaphor of dandelions and orchids, which originated with the paediatrician Tom Boyce at Berkeley. He used it to describe two types of child, one who did well in a range of circumstances (the dandelion), and one who succeeded only under a narrow set of circumstances (the orchid). Journalists liked it – the US science writer David Dobbs was writing a book under this title. It was thought to be conventionally successful. But it had never been tested with users.
We found that people knew what orchids and dandelions were (not always something you can count on). Also, the comparison appeared to help them understand why certain children do well and others don’t. Yet there was a problem: people valued the orchid and looked down on the dandelion. The culture said they should value the rare, beautiful thing, not the sturdy weed. And so the average American saw no sense in making more dandelions. Besides, their child was not common but special and rare. When people won’t use a term to describe their own kids, that’s a giveaway that the metaphor won’t work. In the end, we developed the metaphor of a weighing scale to explain how positive influences can outweigh negative ones in a child’s early life, thereby making resilience not a trait of the individual person but a function of that person’s environment.
When I describe my work, people often ask whether these new metaphors actually change how people think. They can. When my colleagues and I tested a set of candidate metaphors on the streets, asking random strangers what skills are, the respondents mumbled in their usual ways. Then we gave them a metaphor in which skills are like ropes, woven out of many components braided together, and asked them more questions. It’s not that they became silver-tongued, exactly, but the fumbling abated. They began to talk about the parts of skills, how they have to be combined, and so on. It’s as if this new idea, which we gave to them, had taken them by the hand. Now they were walking down the street together, and the metaphor was showing them things. That’s how we knew that what we were doing with metaphors was working.
by Michael Erard, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Gallery Stock
If you could ask Dante where he got the idea of life as a road, or Rilke where he found the notion that time is a destroyer, they might have said the metaphors were hewn from their minds, or drawn from a stock of poetic imagery. Their readers might have said the imagery had origins more divine, perhaps even diabolical. But neither poets nor readers would have said the metaphors were designed. That is, the metaphors didn’t target people’s cognitive processes. They weren’t engineered to affect us in a specific way.
Can metaphors be designed? I’m here to tell you that they can, and are. For five years I worked full-time as a metaphor designer at the FrameWorks Institute, a think tank in Washington, DC, whose clients are typically large US foundations (never political campaigns or governments). I continue to shape and test metaphors for private-sector clients and others. In both cases, these metaphors are meant to help people to understand the unfamiliar. They aren’t supposed to make someone remark: ‘That’s beautiful.’ They’re meant to make someone realise that they’ve only been looking at one side of a thing.
Here’s an example. In the 1960s, the US philosopher Donald Schön spent some time at the consulting firm Arthur D Little (he eventually became a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology nearby). He was working with product researchers trying to figure out why a new paintbrush design with synthetic bristles didn’t apply paint smoothly. As Schön related it later, someone in the group suddenly said: ‘A paintbrush is a kind of pump!’Ordinarily, seeing a paintbrush this way would be considered a mistake. In this case, what the researchers knew about pumps suddenly became available for thinking about paintbrushes too. ‘Paintbrush as pump’ isn’t beautiful, but it’s very useful. It was, as Schön wrote later, ‘a generative metaphor for the researchers in the sense that it generated new perceptions, explanations, and inventions’. (Among other things, it led to new bristle designs that would bend the right way.)
Metaphor designers create these pseudo-mistakes deliberately. Sometimes the metaphors end up in op-eds or public-service announcements. Sometimes they’re useful for helping people conceive of solutions to problems, or for internal communications in organisations. The challenge for the designer is to generate lots of pseudo-mistakes, some of which can be used for thinking and that have the power to stick around. For someone like me who is reflexively metaphorical (my wedding invite was built around the idea of a labyrinth), these are satisfying tasks, and, as a writer, I have no problem leaving material on the cutting room floor. But it’s when we start testing our metaphors for their social and cognitive usability that design can become really powerful. (...)
That said, you do have to be careful with emotional responses. I worked on a project about childhood resilience. The question was how do children turn out well despite difficult circumstances? We had become acquainted with the metaphor of dandelions and orchids, which originated with the paediatrician Tom Boyce at Berkeley. He used it to describe two types of child, one who did well in a range of circumstances (the dandelion), and one who succeeded only under a narrow set of circumstances (the orchid). Journalists liked it – the US science writer David Dobbs was writing a book under this title. It was thought to be conventionally successful. But it had never been tested with users.
We found that people knew what orchids and dandelions were (not always something you can count on). Also, the comparison appeared to help them understand why certain children do well and others don’t. Yet there was a problem: people valued the orchid and looked down on the dandelion. The culture said they should value the rare, beautiful thing, not the sturdy weed. And so the average American saw no sense in making more dandelions. Besides, their child was not common but special and rare. When people won’t use a term to describe their own kids, that’s a giveaway that the metaphor won’t work. In the end, we developed the metaphor of a weighing scale to explain how positive influences can outweigh negative ones in a child’s early life, thereby making resilience not a trait of the individual person but a function of that person’s environment.
When I describe my work, people often ask whether these new metaphors actually change how people think. They can. When my colleagues and I tested a set of candidate metaphors on the streets, asking random strangers what skills are, the respondents mumbled in their usual ways. Then we gave them a metaphor in which skills are like ropes, woven out of many components braided together, and asked them more questions. It’s not that they became silver-tongued, exactly, but the fumbling abated. They began to talk about the parts of skills, how they have to be combined, and so on. It’s as if this new idea, which we gave to them, had taken them by the hand. Now they were walking down the street together, and the metaphor was showing them things. That’s how we knew that what we were doing with metaphors was working.
by Michael Erard, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Gallery Stock
