Innovation is often driven by design, modeling or architecture - but what drives those? Often times it's a cultural interaction - an application of metaphors or symbols. "Windows "are a metaphor for how we choose to manage User Interfaces for example.
My all time favorite example of the use of
metaphor goes back to the middle ages; traveling bards used to present
stories and poems to audiences from town to town before the advent of
print. This was an interesting variation of storytelling tradition that
occurs in most cultures – but what many of the bards did to manage
their storytelling experience was construct the story-telling
experience out of a metaphor. The metaphor was often imagining a house
– and within each room the storyteller would locate an important part
of the plot, items within the room would trigger specific details in
the retelling. In many ways what this represented was a mental
discovery and / or content management application. We’ve all variations
of this them today – the most obvious example is what we refer to as a
“Chat Room,” but other applications have used the room and structures
metaphors for similar functionality.
So why
metaphors, what’s the value proposition we’re describing here? A
metaphor is generally only useful if it applied as a means to leverage
existing knowledge to help facilitate some other action. That action
might be story telling or driving heavy equipment, but in most cases
the action we’re hoping to facilitate is somewhat complex in nature. So
the question is; can someone learn everything they need to know about
fulfilling this new complex action in a reasonable timeframe, and if
the answer is no, then what exactly can be done to reduce the learning
curve? Simply because someone is using a new technology to accomplish a
familiar task it doesn’t mean that all aspect of the task need to
change also. There are many other benefits to this type of continuity
besides a reduction in learning costs; they include:
- Greater likelihood of acceptance and adoption of the capability
- A Greater likelihood that the new capability will be able inter-operate with examples of the old capability still in place elsewhere
- The ability to improve on but maintain process approaches that have proven themselves to be effective.
Example
The
best example of something I’ve been involved with that is essentially a
metaphor is an online magazine or newspaper. Perhaps this was an easy
step to take due to the nature of Internet and it’s ability to
disseminate information, but the fact of the matter is that it allowed
for massive restructuring of the previous business model (including
operations such as printing and delivery) without significantly changed
the user perception of the capability or product. The biggest
difference of course is the lack of paper involved with the Internet
versions; however this is something that is being worked out by vendors
right now – new delivery interfaces that are nearly as thin as paper
and are bendable will be available in the next several years. Along
with anti-glare screens this will come fairly close to the hands-on
tactile experience of reading a real magazine (and much more
efficiently as the device can upload any magazine’s content through
wireless connection and is not disposable).
Following
the metaphor then, all aspects of content design (including
advertising) would approximately the current look and feel of typical
magazines. The one area that the current manifestation of the metaphor
cannot handle which the new one can is the ability to embed
interactivity with other applications. For the interactivity, the only
guidepost we have with current publications are written games such as
crossword puzzles. In these types of situations though, I think what
actually happens though is that we tend to borrow from multiple
metaphors to build a new capability. So, the new magazine borrows
metaphors from video gaming, broadcasting, old publishing models and
B2B web applications to achieve a new type of approach. This is not too
different than what has just happened with the new i-Phones.
Copyright 2012, Semantech Inc. All rights Reserved
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