Ps AND QsWhat's in a name?: idioms, metaphors, and design

“I’ll wall you,” someone teased me the other day. If you do, I’ll poke you, I retorted. We both laughed. The person sitting next to us looked mystified. I proceeded to try and explain that no, my friend wasn’t going to come to my house with a spray-paint can and personally annotate a wall. And no, I wasn’t going to reach over with my bony index finger and prod him in the side. Give it a shot: Explain to someone who has never been on a social-networking site, much less used Facebook, what it means to “write on my wall” or to “poke” someone. A lot of words, several dubious analogies, and a couple of wobbly metaphors later, I gave up, got my laptop out, and proceeded to demonstrate—to show him just why writing that thing feels like such a threat, and why my poking back lacks firepower. To be honest, it isn’t even clear to me if being poked is a good or bad thing. But, by “walling me” with that comment, my friend was essentially saying he would embarrass me publicly by sharing something mind-bendingly silly with all the folks who are my Facebook friends. Walls, poking, and friendship. This all got me thinking about communication—in particular about the language we use when naming the human-computerhuman interactions we design, and more generally, about idioms, metaphors, and idiomatic reasoning. And about metaphorical memes, shared understandings thereof (or not), and the actions that invite, inspire, and imply. It has been argued that our conceptual system, the terms in which we think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. Idioms, metaphors, and similes are evocative. They describe one thing in terms of another, enhancing our conceptualization—often of both things. Telling someone they look like a bulldog licking mustard off a thistle or that they look like a shaved monkey reflected in a spoon is going to make you think differently, even if only for a second and only for humorous effect. Similes, analogies, and idioms sometimes spring from experiences with technology. Some are easy to trace. “Don’t stand there like one o’clock half struck,” my mother used to say to me. (Think about it.) Some idioms stand the test of time; to burn the candle at both ends has been a warning for decades, probably longer. The blocks didn’t fall right is readily understood to mean something did not work out as planned, even to people who have never played Tetris, whence the idiom purportedly derives. Sometimes idioms converge conceptually despite their divergent sources. All singing, all dancing, and fully loaded—one idiom in performance, the other in capacity, but now they are used interchangeably in conversation. make sense to a lot of people— including me. I found it absolutely not intuitive. For context, I had ventured into the world of file and folder icons from the land of the command line. Consequently, on this first exposure to the desktop graphical user interface or “GUI,” I spent a long time looking for grep. I mistakenly tried to concatenate files by slamming one icon into another. Finally, I sat paralyzed for some time, refusing stubbornly to drag my floppy disk icon into the trash can, or “the bin” as I called it, being British, because I did not believe this was the way to eject a floppy disk. No, I reasoned, that would surely simply erase everything on it the disk—throw it all away. Wrong mental model. As HCI pioneers Frank Halasz and Tom Moran pointed out in 1982, this was an analogy-inspired mental model that could be considered harmful; it certainly caused me some stress and a few cross words. Looking back I thank the stars (whoever they may be) for desktop search. I also learned to say it correctly as “gooey” and later was satisfied to publish something with that name. Beyond limited representational correspondence, there is little similarity between the socially embedded and physically embodied interaction of manipulating papers files and folders and pointing and clicking on icons. Or between writing on a Facebook wall and grafitti-ing the brick structure I can see out of my window. However, there’s a lot to be said for playful, memorable visual cues and nice mnemonics (and in the case of the desktop metaphor, good consistency across application menus). These are great ways to get people to spend time and learn to use the maddest and baddest of interface designs. And, with exposure, somehow these odd connections start to feel like they are obvious and intuitive. It is a strange trait of human beings that we tend to forget how confusing things were before we learned them. Which brings us to another common phrase—it’s easy if you know how. Few idioms and metaphors are translatable into other languages. I don’t have any ready technologyinspired foreign idioms to illustrate this point, but to pull the radishes by the leaves purportedly means to get the wrong end of the stick in Spanish. And when talking to someone who speaks Spanish, if you want to spill the beans, you set free the pigs. Some turns of phrase cross subculture boundaries; the desktop metaphor is a case in point. But there are many that probably don’t. When and how do our turns of phrase and pithy analogies become contentful, recognized idioms or metaphors, understood by a culture or subculture? And what happens when someone comes along and tries to keep a metaphor in In technology design, metaphors are also often used to nudge people to act in certain ways. The desktop metaphor is a well-known example—the use of documents, files, and folders as pointers to. documents, files and folders. In 1999, Bill Hibbard, emeritus senior scientist at the Space Science and Engineering Center, articulately invited us at ACM’s SIGGRAPH to “find effective visual idioms for direct manipulation user interactions with visualizations” and to “find effective visual idioms for collaborative interactions among multiple users. ” But, there be dragons. Metaphors and analogies underpin our creative leaps, our lateral thinking, our inspirations, but they also constrain us. In lazy moments metaphors become the thing, become reified and reused, confused with fact or rules for design. Scaffolding reasoning through metaphors, similes, and analogies can lead to problems of initial understanding, design rigidity, and overextension, and—perhaps most interestingly for the global world of internetbased interaction and communication—problems of translation and derivation. To the first point, inevitably there will be breaks in design metaphors. For example, years ago, despite a friend’s insistence that the desktop metaphor interface was “absolutely intuitive,” the metaphor did not immediately place but at the same time extend it? “What’s Mebendazole and laxatives for a computer? I think I’ve got a worm. ” This is an extended metaphor that I am pretty sure won’t catch on. Do people have slightly different meanings ascribed to idioms? Do they become slippery over time? And what happens when you retain the form, prompting the meaning, but replace words accidentally or intentionally (as my friend’s German-speaking mother did when learning English in stating that a popular form of face-cream was “selling like hot bricks? ”) I still knew what she meant, but typing it into my regular search engine just now offered a dog’s breakfast of results. Sometimes the original derivation of an idiom gets lost. I am not sure that always matters. But, personally, I worry that there is incipient ideology that lurks therein. and that I am inadvertently saying something, that if I understood it, I would be mortified at my gaucheness. Someone once told me that they had named their game design company something that sounded cool in English but that meant something heinous in Swahili. That cautionary tale is worth heeding. How does all this relate to a favorite idiom, the source of this column’s name? Mind your Ps and Qs. Following a short but effective pilot-study methodology (I asked all my friends) and a preliminary literature review (I searched the D av id G ar tn er