The Pocket Universal Methods of Design, Revised and Expanded

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Metaphors

A method to investigate how people understand concepts, help them understand in new ways, and generate new ideas

• A metaphor is “a device for seeing something in terms of something else. It brings out the thisness of a that or the thatness of a this.”
• Interaction and product design often use metaphors to introduce people to new ways of doing things, by relating them to familiar ideas.
• Designers can use a process of eliciting the metaphors that people might be—consciously or unconsciously— using to imagine or understand the systems around them, or complex ideas.
• Participatory drawing methods, image collages or mood boards, or even constructing physical models can all help as projective methods to reveal the underlying metaphors, ...