we cut the world into pieces with words, distinctions, categories. analogy and metaphor sews things back together, reminds us of the inherent sameness of everything
we cut the world into pieces with words, distinctions, categories. analogy and metaphor sews things back together, reminds us of the inherent sameness of everything
As humans we like to put things into categories. It makes communicating and thinking easier. Scratch that. It makes communicating and thinking possible. Categories go hand in hand with words as providing us with crucial compression of reality.
Albert Wenger • Progress vs. Categories
A simple truth: metaphors shape human interactions. They are not just poetic writing tools, rather they’re the lenses through which we experience being part of a group dynamic. Today, they can help us understand the paradigm shift the digital economy is undergoing.
Mirror • The Power of Metaphor! Using Our Lenses to Enrich Web3 Communiti…
Metaphors give us a way to infuse our technology with the wisdom and care they currently lack. We can learn to internalize different metaphors as a solution to creating communities in a highly complex, context-dependent digital era.
Mirror • The Power of Metaphor! Using Our Lenses to Enrich Web3 Communiti…
Metaphors are interpreters—what interpreters do for bits and bytes, metaphors do for reality. They translate physical experiences into thoughts, ideas, insights and lessons that can be interpreted and understood, acted upon and shared.
Metaphors are used in computer interfaces in order to aid user to understand a new target domain by allowing them to comprehend it in terms of a source domain they understand [Baecker et al. 1995]. In order to generate useful metaphors, Erickson points to note what metaphors are already implicit in the problem description [Erickson 1990].
Computer Science Digital Library • Desktop Metaphor
From the never-ceasing flux around us, we carve entities out of space and out of time: people, places, things, events. We freeze them, turn them into words and concepts. We change those moving things into static things so that we can act on them with our minds.
Barbara Tversky • Mind in Motion
More than just analogy, metaphor shows us the connection between situations with a similar feeling tone.