Our phones speak in metaphors
Been reading a lot about the metaphors that inform the ways we use and interact with our laptops and phones. For now, this article is a gathering of metaphors in the daily devices we use, and eventually I’ll try to form it into a coherent essay.
Examples to sift through
- Websites are a metaphor of paper docs
- Pages, bookmarks, black text on white, scrolling down, etc.
- Does horizontal scrolling make appearances in RTL languages?
- Pages, bookmarks, black text on white, scrolling down, etc.
- Modern UI are all metaphors
- e.g. hitting a delete button doesn’t literally delete if you look at the code underneath
- Some swipe gestures are a metaphor of space
- Swiping across screens can give the feeling of a large spatial area when there is none
- Pinching to zoom in/out, swiping across panels, etc.
- Computer mouses (mice?) are an abstraction (i.e. metaphor) of the keyboard
- Investigate touch screens
- Phones themselves are a metaphor actually
- Cuz they’re actually just mini-computers and phoning others is one (arguably minor) feature of many
- How did we get here? Who made these decisions?
- Role of metaphors in design
References and inspo
- Metaphors We Web By talks about how the web is built on the metaphor of paper documents.
- Abstracting Craft discusses the history of computer screens and how it came to be that we move a mouse to control a pointer.