Sketching seems to in the zeitgeist. There are a bunch of books out on the topic (Dan Roam’s “Back of the Napkin”, and Bill Buxton’s “Sketching User Experiences“), more books on the way (like Rosenfeld Media’s book by Kevin “OK/Cancel” Cheng, “See What I Mean: Using Comics to Communicate Ideas”), and plenty of talks and presentations all about sketching. I had a previous career in the animation industry, so I’m thrilled to see that some of that experience is turning out to be relevant to the design work I do today, particularly around storyboarding.
A couple weeks ago, I caught Bill Verplank’s talk titled “Sketching Metaphors” at BayCHI.
Verplank gave us his background. He joined Xerox in 1978 and was on the team that built the Alto and the Star. He explained how meatspace offices and real desktops were adopted as design metaphors, that were then used to develop principles which were applied to the GUIs of those then-cutting-edge computational devices the team was building. (A quick look outside your browser chrome confirms that their “desktop” metaphor had long legs.)
At the time they were developing the Alto, however, Verplank said not everyone on the team was in love with the desktop metaphor. Some felt it was wrong to give computer GUIs the afforances of meatspace, because it suggested an inaccurate model for what the computer is actually doing, and could possibly limit the technology’s potential to supporting only those tasks that fit neatly into that metaphor.
Using an IDEO project he worked on in the ’90s as a case study, Verplank demonstrated how fruitful the right metaphor can be in design concepting and ideation. After trying out a couple faulty metaphors (one wasn’t flexible enough, another was too obscure), the team settled on the cow as the right metaphor for the project. Like food passes through a cow’s multi-chambered stomach, the end users experienced a multi-phase workflow. Some of what the client ingested (data, or “grass”) was converted into profitable output (actionable findings, the “milk and cream”).
But that didn’t mean the final design should look like a cow. Verplank talked about how it is important to recognize the limits of a metaphor. Sometimes they can carry straight through, from concepting to design. But sometimes it’s just as important to abandon it. (The final design of the “cow” project worked more like a folded map. Users could unfold sections for inspection, and then refold them.)
The talk got me thinking. I’ve been doing a lot of work recently around social media experiences. Perhaps it’s something to do with my growing up in Healdsburg, but one metaphor for social media I’ve been toying with is the production, distribution, and consumption of wine.
As with the production of media, there’s a wide scale of winemaker operations — from the big, faceless juggernauts to the mid-sized, family-owned estates, down to the inspired hobbyist making cabernet in the chicken coop. The quality of product ranges by maker and bottle (or sometimes by box). Consumers gather at wine bars, where they socialize as they taste and talk about different vintages. Or, if they want, people can take a bottle home and drink alone. Exploring the metaphor further might lead to some interesting design ideas for a media experience. For example, wines are regularly rated and reviewed, and wineries often produce detailed talk-sheets to guide people through a tasting experience. Perhaps some facet of these advice strategies could help media consumers find and digest media that suits their tastes, situation, or mood.
As with the cow example, there’s a limit to how far the wine metaphor can or should go. Wine production is lengthy, involving growth, harvest, and blending. It is perhaps antithetical to the rush with which most digital media finds its way online. I asked a co-worked if she could come up with any sort of parallel to wine’s aging process. “Waiting for media to load,” she suggested. But with a difference of seconds compared to years, it’s clear the wine metaphor is probably not the best metaphor for social media.
Just considering it as a metaphor, though, did provoke some new thinking and gave me a different perspective I can use (or not) to inform future design work. Sometimes a cow is just a cow, but it’s worth spending a few cycles to consider how a cow might also be a business operations unit.
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