Exhibit Tips

We first began class with some advice on our exhibit project. We should be looking at museums and brief our team about the experience. As we are doing so, we can see what works, what doesn’t, and add more tricks to our repertoire. In addition, we should be looking at the space and the types of interactions that occur in that space, and become inspired by that.

It’s Metaphor Time

Basically, a metaphor is a comparison of two different things, through which understanding is communicated through something else. There are three aspects of metaphors: the tenor: the thing one is trying to express; the vehicle: the thing one is comparing it to; the ground: what unites the previous two.

This type of language is pervasive in our language, and is used often in rhetoric as a way of ornamenting language. Very often, it is hard to say stuff without using metaphor. Metaphors are central to cognition – how we perceive and how we act – and our conceptual system is metaphorical. For example, the phrase argument as war: this phrase relies upon us realizing that fighting and violence is a central aspect of arguing. If we were to use this metaphor with dance instead, our whole concept of arguing would be fundamentally different. We have to try to make these metaphors in a balanced and aesthetc way.

Today’s pony to add is on pp5, the essenece of metaphor:

is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another – Lakoff

The authors give types of examples of metaphors to help make it easier to understand and classify them:

• structural – one term as structural unit of another – time is money
• orientational – gives direction, space or time or both
• ontological – reification, abstraction becomes entity, personification
• anthropomorphic – making something have humanlike qualities
• conduit – the use of language as a vessel of understanding

The whole point as to why we’re looking at language is help direct understanding – this is the whole point to our video prototype and what we are trying to express in our exhibits. If we continue to work in our current practice, then we will always be choosing metaphors people will be interacting with. Examples of common metaphors are the desktop, and Apple’s Time Machine.

We also took a look at Bill Verplank’s way of working in interaction design. He gives us the intelligent system metahpor, the system as tool, the system as media, the system as a form of life, the system as a vehicle, and the system as fashion. He also describes this process as 4 stages: motivation, meaning, modes, and mappings. We then took a look at how metaphors are used in popular software programs (GarageBand).

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It’s now at 12.