Metaphoria Digitalus

Working on a startup feels like you’re standing at the edge of the ocean at high tide. The work piles up. You have 17 programs open on your computer and each browser has 20+ tabs. Your attention has the staying power of a fly in the rain. The work crescendos, crashes, drenches your being and then, suddenly, pulls back. Calmness floats in like fog in the bay. The calm is just the build up of the next wave. The calm is the next wave of work sucking up material render its abundant potential energy into kinetic force. The next wave of work is growing before you’ve had a moment to catch you breath, to orientate yourself. And then it crests and crashes and pulls back and grows again.

Does one try to escape the waves by traveling up the beach or out, into the water, beyond the shore? What does the metaphor suggest?

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I have this impression that the people who worked on the Xerox Star at Xerox in the late 70’s and early 80’s possess an incredible intuition for metaphor. The desktop metaphor did not just appear to them, no. It resulted from numerous observation sessions. I have seen some proverbial sketches-on-a-bar-napkin insight leaps where the idea of the desktop as the guiding metaphor jumped forward another operational step.

Bill Verplank was working on the interface of the Xerox Star from 1978 to 1986. Today, his design process is fantastically succinct. It sums up as finding a motivation, gathering meaning (through metaphor) for that motivation, modeling the solution space and mapping the controls mechanisms of an interface to the hooks in the solution space.

According to Bill, the meaning of the design comes from the story that you tell about it and if you can spin a good metaphor, it will makes sense to people.

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