Designing Information Technology in the Postmodern Age
Richard Coyene, MIT Press

· Metaphor consists of giving something a name that belongs to something else
· "a house is a machine" - to see sameness in difference is the genius of metaphor
· We detect sameness in spite of the overwhelming presence of difference
· The game of metaphor: to create new meaning through the interplay between sameness and difference
· To understand a metaphor is always to interpret it - to bring meaning to it

· Metaphor - a creative process by which to charge something with added meaning
· Creating conflict between sameness and difference through defying categories
· Metaphor bypasses accepted categories to reveal "unnoticed similarities in our experiences"
· We "misclassify a "house as a machine"

· The tension - Is the proposition a truth? a fiction? or a metaphor?
· Metaphor - the uneasy space between "is" and "is not"
· Search for truth: Truth is not in what words correspond but in what they reveal
· Truth is on the metaphoric level, not in the literal

· Computer hardware are named after familiar things: memory, gate, chip, processor, etc.
· The entire computer system is made up of metaphors - hardware to icons (trash, etc.)
· Design - functions to arrive at the appropriate metaphors
· Design - becomes a process of metaphor efficiency
· The screen is an imaginary sheet of blank paper
· We imagine we are touching real objects
· Computer design - electric impulses waiting to be symbolized through whatever metaphor we desire!
· Some metaphors badly chosen - trash - to eject disks
 

· Lakoff and Johnson - language is grounded in the human body as reference
· We shape metaphors according to our sense of the body in the world even our thinking activities
· Ex - "we see the answer to a problem", "we are deeply touched", "we make up our minds"
· We orchestrate according to the concept of containment: Interior/exterior. - in/out
· We see our bodies as containers - ingest and excrete, take air in breathe it out
· Other metaphor structures: paths, links, forces, balance, up/down, part-to-whole, center-periphery

1. Containment: in/out: "let out your anger", "let's start out from the following assumption"
2. Force: "pushing something through"
3. Balance: "we weight evidence", "we balance conflicting requirements"
4. Metaphor of tools: "We sharpen our wits"

· Heidegger points to our ability to already be where we want to go:
· Before I move across the room, I am already there by my desire to reach my destination
· It is only because I am already there conceptually that I am able to physically go there

· Technology provides metaphors through which we understand phenomena
· The computer as intelligent assistant: codifying knowledge, modeling cognition
· To see the computer as theater is to think in terms of actors, scripts, spectacle, etc.
· Technology of literacy -> have influenced the primacy of method, individualism, objectivity
· Thought patterns become organized according to models of language organization (a result of writing)
· Technology metaphors create their own problems: problem solving leads to a concern with accuracy of information transfer (encoding, decoding)
· The progress of technological development excites our senses in the promise of creating difference - a metaphoric process similar as it provides a new way of seeing/interacting with the world
· Dependencies between technologies can be understood as metaphoric
· Metaphor of "Skeuomorphism": archaeological term to designate a "nonfunctional" feature of a design that derives from a precursor = ex. Greek columns, the screen cursor as a pencil.
· Metaphors provide a basis for evaluating technologies: A problem may be solved by coming up with a new metaphor