We Shape Our Metaphors, and Thereafter Our Metaphors Shape Us

The role of metaphor in design, culture, and the architecture of the human experience.

Bulbs go on ceilings, pavements go down the sides of roads, calendars are made up of 365 equally sized squares. These are all constructions we live within, ideas we have designed over the centuries — mere perspectives, in other words; solidified interpretations, if you will. Interpretations of reality so deeply written into our experience of the world that we do not question them — they are integral, they are convenient, they are natural. Which begs the question: Why, exactly? Some might hastily make a case for these designs built on how they “do their job well”: a bulb does its job best — viz. lighting up the room — when it is placed at the highest point of the room. Fair enough, but how did we come to conclude that the bulb’s purpose is to light up the room? That’s an obvious conclusion if we look at the bulb of today and the world it has constructed around it, but how about when the bulb wasn’t adapted for this purpose — the idea of the bulb, the concept, the first form it ever took in a world that got along fine without its existence; what crazy intuition was it to conclude that this strange dream of electronics must be the source of an entire room’s — an entire species’ — illumination? And more importantly, why did the entire world come to universally accept it after millennia of not once being conscious of its absence in our lives?

Functionality is a shallow ground to stand on because it is not through functionality that we build the world but rather through our perception of meaning — from which we secondarily infer functionality. The question is not so much why the bulb is placed where it is placed as it is what the bulb fundamentally means to us. In turn, the question of meaning is not as much what the bulb means to us as it is how do we subjectively interpret the meaning of the bulb — and what consequences this process of subjective interpretation carries with it for the architecture of the human experience.

Beyond functionality and our perception of meaning, this essay is an exploration of human understanding, design, and culture — the points where they intersect and the places where they diverge, and above all, the manner in which they interact with the individual to define their place in the world.

I

Man was made in the image of God, and by the same token, the world was made in the image of Man. We constantly bleed ourselves into the world as we experience the human experience, and in doing so, we construct it. Over generations, what is natural inside each of us is distilled out to form culture, and the boundaries of the world that we bind ourselves to; a constructed reality to interact with. A bubble we are doomed to live within — a bubble built and rebuilt, every day, such that we might live in a bigger world tomorrow by the sweat of today.

The fabric of the world can be conceptualized as an aggregate of all the natural instincts — the solutions — with which we responded to the problems that we had to face — as individuals, as communities, as cultures, as a species. What is of interest to our pursuit, however, is not “what” but “how”: How do human beings design and negotiate solutions in the face of adversity? By what stroke of luck or lightning do the solutions to our problems emerge on the surface of our shared consciousness?

Binding the scope of our general discussion to a specific, concrete allegory might prove fruitful. Let us examine language, the greatest of all man-made designs, and in doing so let us hope to find universal truths about the man-made construction of the world itself. Language solves the problem of our inability to adequately communicate our individual sets of knowledge and experiences with other human beings. It does this by creating shared symbols as representations of elements of knowledge — elements such as concepts, sentiments, and other entities that we behold collectively. These symbols — words — are nothing but combinations of grunts and inarticulate sounds, eloquently referred to as “syllables,” which have been “magically” bestowed complicated meanings and definitions, and by the same token, utility.

Words emerge as a response to the requirements of a people, the problems of a culture. Our ancestors felt the need to label only that which they experienced, and thus language is not just a tool but also a tapestry of the experiences and the priorities of a culture — the “road map” which reflects the interpretations of the world into which we were born. The same phenomenon can be seen echoed in tools like Quora, which serve as tapestries of information and perspectives born as an outcome of the problems and the curiosities of people that came before us; or in designs like houses, where we inherit templates to adhere to (there should exist a dining room, a bedroom, a kitchen, and so on) figured out by the needs and requirements of generations of human beings that came before ourselves.

The specific question relevant to our pursuit that still remains largely unanswered, however, is the question of the “magic”: the subject of language’s original construction — not merely the etymological roots that words have in other languages through the course of history but the very process by which they originally came into being at the root of all the roots. The birthplace of not just a specific word but of the entire idea of the language. Where, how, and why did words ever enter the realm of our experience; and by extension, where, how, and why did the entire world as we know it ever enter our realm of experience? This is the question that we must presently turn our attention to.

The answer to this question seems to be embedded in a tendency that we are all guilty of indulging in on a near daily basis — unconscious expressions such as “ouch,” “hmm,” and “umm”. Linguists call these “pause fillers;” utterances through which we universally express and recognize our peers’ states of mind during social interactions. Their universality is worth noting because it speaks to something fundamentally objective about their existence; it implies that all English speakers are intrinsically programmed to express, or at least to recognize, confusion through “hmm” and hesitation through “umm.”

This, to me, seems to be the birthplace of language (and therefore of all human construction) — human behaviour. Universal instincts that a group of people are intrinsically programmed to express, in a way that is either natural or so deeply cultural that it is tantamount to being natural. We utter these unconscious instincts in way of expression as we interact, and when enough of us have coinciding natural instincts surrounding the same sentiment or concept in a specific place and time, we solidify the sound through an unspoken consensus: “ouch” symbolizes a sensation of pain. Over centuries, these codified symbols become the stepping stones through which we instinctually respond to more nuanced categories of our experience, and thus language gets compounded on itself, expanding outwards from these seeds that we planted; moving towards multisyllabic words; more complicated combinations of sentiments, more nuanced ideas, more niche experiences — birthed from the accumulation of our human instincts right at the center. It is the accumulation of the instincts through which a culture consensually perceived the world around itself; the abstracted spirit of man. Language, in other words, is one of the oldest examples of human-centered design.

Where language is born as a projection of embodied human behaviour, so is the rest of the world. Houses, for instance, are codified manifestations of individual and collective ways of living abstracted from how human beings intrinsically tend to live and dream and emote. Laws of a nation are material manifestations of moral and social codes of conduct that proved to be the formula for peaceful societies in that culture — externalizations of the elements of behaviour that a culture naturally possesses; institutional constructions in the image of man.

Nietzsche contended that words are “metaphors which were worn out,” like “coins which have lost their pictures and now matter only as metal” — that the word “leaf” is a metaphor for the conceptual category of leaves, “dream” for the universal experience of dreams. This application of the term “metaphor” might be starkly removed from the flowery impression that the term typically implies to most of us; an impression which would be best abandoned in our high school literature classes. Essentially, metaphors are explanatory representations of unknown abstractions through known forms, typically resonating through a shared intrinsic attribute. Take Shakespeare’s famous metaphor “all world’s a stage” — the world (unknown abstraction) can be explained through the known form of the stage and drama; or the statement “the meeting went from 2 PM to 4 PM” — the passage of time between two events (unknown abstraction) can be understood as the distance between two points in space (known form) — a metaphor that a lot of us unconsciously employ to understand the passage of time.

The stage intrinsically shares properties with the world, and the passage of time with space, thereby making them metaphors and not mere representations. Thus, the contention we must try to rationalize is not just about the symbolic nature of words but also about its intrinsic properties; how is the sound of the combination of syllables “li-f” intrinsically resonant with the conceptual category of leaves? This is the ultimate question, and in pursuing its answer we stand to gain an improved understanding not just of language but also of metaphor itself, and its widespread application in human understanding and comprehension.

Let us further explore, one last time, what a word means to the human experience. Words in all of their glory, as we discussed, are nothing but material extensions of the embodied human instinct; manifestations of the manner in which a culture intrinsically perceived the experience of a concept. What this tells us about the word “leaf” is that when humanity experienced the concept of the leaf, the shared instinct with which we naturally responded to the leaf’s existence is encoded deep down inside the fabric of the utterance “li-f.” This combination of syllables is a culturally negotiated manifestation of our shared perception of the leaf’s existence — distilled out over centuries of our shared experience. We reached a consensus, an unspoken agreement, that this is the reaction a leaf elicits from us in the English worldview. It resonates in the fundamental wiring of our humanity — this is how our ancestors were intrinsically wired up to perceive the leaf, and this is how we shall continue to perceive it.

By the merit of this deep resonance between the utterance and the beholder, we can confer upon the word the status of a metaphor.

Media theorist Marshall McLuhan famously contended that all media (including language) are the extensions of man, and an example he used to make his case was that of electronic media — wiring centered around a central processor — as an extension of our central nervous systems. The idea here is the same fundamental truth: we construct the world through the tools of our established knowledge; we contextualise the abstractions of the unknown by bringing it into our repositories of known forms. This is why cars have 2 headlights and not 3 or 4: its face is made in the image of the human’s. This is why AUX and earphone pins and earphone jacks go together like human genitalia. This is why wire connectors come in binary forms of Male and Female. This is why, indirectly, our political systems are set up as binaries — the right wing and left wing, extensions of the human body.

Languages and other institutions of experience, therefore, are all metaphors — reverberations of the unknown in the echos of the known, shaped as we perceive the shapes of ourselves. We use these metaphors to understand the world, expand our understanding of the world, and map our pathway of behaviour through the world, and in doing so, we construct the world. Metaphors, by their very nature, are channels that guide the way into the future by contextualizing the path ahead in the plane of our existing knowledge, projections of our past — not just wisdom or technical information but all the facets of experience that we have adopted as our own: our ways of living, our political systems, the tools we use, the food we eat, the experiences we indulge in, the language we speak — born from both: our own journeys through life as well as our ancestors’ shared journey transmitted to us through culture. We are bounded by the limits of the body of our knowledge; perpetually inhabiting the shadow that it casts. The only way forward is by constructing newer associations, newer metaphors, newer representations to construct a new world as an extension of the old — by building, in other words, the metaphors of tomorrow with the tools of yesterday.

II

Metaphors are 2-way channels through which we communicate with the objects that we interact with. Unknown objects have not entered our theater of perception until we contextualize them through metaphor and assign them meaning in our view of the world. This perception is an interaction between the object and the beholder, a negotiation between the world and the designer. It is at this point that the role of the designer enters the story.

When the world interacts with new, unknown tools and information, and tries to make sense of them, it is through metaphor that this process of understanding might be facilitated. The world interprets the tool by mapping it onto its existing repository of knowledge, and in doing so, assigning the tool a place in its theater of perception — a place from which we might then infer its intended functionality. The process of creating a metaphor to interpret the experience of an object is the product of 2 human minds: the beholder’s, who experiences the object, and the designer’s, who designed the object. Where the beholder tries to make sense of the object in the manner we just described, the designer can step out of this schema and preemptively inspect the extent of the beholders’ “existing repository of knowledge” so as to insightfully design the object such that it itself suggests a metaphor through which it might be perceived and interpreted by a beholder.

iMessages and WhatsApp Messenger representing each message like a dialogue bubble from a comic strip, for instance, is an example of a well-crafted metaphor. Social media comment sections being reminiscent of a page from a drama script is another such example. These designs inherently suggest metaphors to think with, and thereby inherently convey a suggestion for interpretation — messages in messenger apps as metaphors for casual, conversational spoken word, and social media as a whole as a metaphor for drama — a metaphor for life — in which we all play personas abstracted from someone real; characters of ourselves. Through this application of metaphor, these designs control how they are being perceived, picking up from where the users’ repositories of known forms end, and holding their hands as they try to make sense of these tools and experiences.

There is a depth to this phenomenon that might go unnoticed if not brought to attention, and it is the inseperable relationship between the metaphor as we experience it and our percetion of the abstraction that it metaphorizes. At the bottom of this depth we find the real weight of the responsibility of the designer. Metaphors, as we discussed, are the language through which the designer communicates with the world, but it is the arena in which this communication of meaning takes place that is of specific importance: inside our own heads. Designers are the ones writing our perceived constructions of the world; controlling how we see the world by designing the very shapes of our thoughts. This is the access that we grant them when we interact with a world designed by another — for better or for worse. Take language: it isn’t merely a referential collection of symbols, but the medium of thought itself; we can not conceive or process knowledge outside of language, this body of knowledge that we inherit — it is only once something has been brought into articulated words that we can grapple with its truth. Had this not been the case, the entire field of psychotherapy would’ve had no reason to exist. Consider the design of the clock, a manifestation of the concept of time. The movement of the hands of the clock stands in as a metaphor for the movement of the planet around the Sun, representing each movement of the earth through a step forward of a tiny plastic hand, across the dial of the clock screen — but this metaphor doesn’t just explain the meaning of the “unknown” planetary movements of the Earth around the Sun by giving us functional context, it even redefines time itself as a concept. What is time, in your definition of the word: the metaphor, or the metaphorized? Is it the grand cosmic movements of the planet through space, or is it the division of the day into hours and minutes as manifest through the dial of the clock? The more common answer is the latter. The design of the clock readjusts our perspective, brings the concept down to a relevant form, and as a result, defines Time itself in its own shadow. This opened up a whole new realm of thought and experience — serving as a design on top of which we have gone on to construct a large part of the world we share. Thus, the metaphor and the design aren’t merely passive representations of remote concepts, but are the concepts themselves, and it is through this interaction with the metaphor that the concept comes to life in our theaters of perception in the first place.

We should begin thinking of events as the primary realities and of time as an abstraction from them — a concept derived mainly from regular repeating events, such as the ticking of clocks. Events are perceived, but time is not (Gibson, 1975).

Design at its core is what culture once was alone — the architecture of meaning in the human experience, the process of interpretation through which the world is brought to life around us, for us, and through us. Much like poets, designers listen to nature and then attempt to channel what they heard through known forms in the hope of bringing nature to speak a familiar language so that the rest of the world might be able to listen in as well. Metaphor is the language through which the designer communicates with the world and guides the world into the unknown, and the experience of the object is the process through which this language is communicated.

This is the design that is the basis of all culture: to deceive nature by means of technology, to replace what is natural with what is artificial and build a machine out of which there comes a god who is ourselves (Vílem Flusser, 1999).

We might now be able to return to take a crack at the original question more intelligently: Why does the bulb sit at the top of the room? Of course, this question is actually about how we perceive the meaning of the bulb in our interpretation of the world, and the answer should be in the form of a metaphor. We see the bulb as a metaphor for the Sun. Consciously or unconsciously, the world interacted with the bulb, an unknown entity, and reached an unspoken consensus that perhaps the appropriate natural interpretation of the bulb would be as an extension of the Sun, a known form — just like we experienced a leaf and responded with the instinctual “li-f.” From this metaphor we inferred functionality: the notion that perhaps the purpose of the bulb should be the same as the Sun’s — to fully illuminate all the spaces it might find itself in, and to find itself in all the spaces that it might. Around this negotiated human instinct with which we responded to the fact of the bulb’s existence, we constructed the bulbed world: this is why we placed the bulb on the ceiling, this is why we switch on our bulbs the instant the Sun sets and go on with our business, undeterred, this is why we get disappointed when our bulbs stop working — we unconsciously expect bulbs to function like the Sun, incessantly, eternally, and to never relent. This is why the bulb is so ubiquitous; the bulb chases the dream of illuminating the world to the extent that the Sun does — and we all bought into this vision, despite ourselves — we sacrificed our own worlds to make this possible; possessed by the spell of the metaphor.

To hold functionality as the ultimate answer to this question is a grave error because it presupposes a level of objective self-awareness to the nature of the human experience that is fundamentally non-existent. We often underestimate the amount of ignorance baked into the constructions that we are and the extent to which we outsource the development of the knowledge that we call our own. Designs do emerge out of necessity, as solutions to problems, but it is not through rationality that we find our solutions, but through embodied human instincts and the metaphors that bind them to reality. The metaphors we live by are the worlds that we live in; there is no difference. This is all that we know about our world and all that we need to know.

III

Human beings solider forward through life in the service of ideals — cultural ideals, familial ideals, personal ideals — abstract visions of the divine that imbibe life with a sense of structure and moral direction. Getting straight As is an ideal. Getting married is an ideal. Building a family is an ideal. Physical beauty is an ideal. These are the pathways to paradise, reasons to strive for better.

Like all abstractions, ideals manifest themselves in our lives through symbols and metaphors; manifest instantiations in understandable, human forms. This is what mythology is at its core: stories of the ideal behaviours and journeys of human beings, manifestations of the heroes our cultures would like us to strive to be. This is what aesthetic experiences are: intimations of beauty that we would like to harness for our own selves. And this is also what designs of institutions and tools are: metaphors for the ideal way of thought and action, the ideal interpretations of nature and natural abstractions that we surround ourselves with.

Consider what we do when we design a house. We place within it dining tables, sofas, television sets, tables — metaphors, stages through which we live out the great dramas of our lives. Each of these things we construct suggest some form of action, an ideal way of performing certain behaviour, whether it’s eating food or taking a nap, and this explicitly imbibes our life with a lifestyle that is not our own.

Consider another one of the great human designs: Language. English, for example, carries in it the ideal that no matter who you are, lowly peasant or mighty emperor, you are equal in the eyes of the society — you will always be referred to with the same pronoun: “you.” Everyone is equally worthy of respect, or the lack thereof — the same ideal that, not coincidentally, has resonated through the British sentiment for a long time, as reflected in the work of English poets such as John Milton.

Design is the choices we make about the world we want to live in. (…) We make the world what it is and then we become the kind of people that live in it. (Wilson Miner, 2011).

Thus, while metaphors are born in resonance with our pasts, and are designed expressly for us to be able to interpret them in the present, they also carry wrapped up in their spirit intimations of the future. Ideals can be seen as the long drawn shadows cast in the wake of the metaphor — the image of the world as the metaphor would like it to be.

As the creators and mass distributors of these metaphors, there naturally does exist a certain glamour in the role of the designer. By the same token, however, there also exists a darkness to their responsibility, a threat of disaster that they must always be wary of. Joseph Campbell wrote that “if you want to change the world, you have to change the metaphor,” and a careful designer would be cautious of the reality that this applies both ways.

We become what we behold. We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us (Marshall McLuhan).

The metaphor of Instagram, perhaps, would be a fitting case study here. Instagram is an institution built on the interpretation that images and image-based media are metaphors for moments of our lives, and a collection of images, laid out over time, are representations of the entire course of our entire lives. It also holds that these representations of ourselves built from our expression at the center is the proper birthplace of our community and our relationships, which is why you can “reply to stories,” a direct gateway into people’s personal messages, and build a relationship born with their token of expression — the story — at the center.

We use Instagram to represent ourselves through expression and in doing so put this metaphor into action. But there is another side to this: just like the clock fundamentally redefined what time itself means to us, Instagram pushed a notion that these images and videos aren’t just representations of moments of our lives, these are our entire lives. While people now value expression and individual differences as a source of different perspectives and social lifestyles more than ever before, people are also more image-conscious than ever before. Instagram has also fed a culture that has internalized the notion that for an incident to be truly valued and recognized as a valuable experience, it has to be caught on camera. We overshare on the internet because our perception is that the things we don’t share are things that we never really experienced; memories that we stand to lose. And in our present culture that romanticises authenticity, it is too huge a price to pay to lose out on these valuable moments, memories, emotions, experiences.

Instagram’s Stories feature carries in it the idea that 24-hour image and image-based captures are representations of our casual temporary experiences and emotions — our stories — of that day, which might as well be forgotten tomorrow. In recent times, however, we have been using Stories more and more as a tool for political activism and discourse on social issues, and as result the underlying metaphor of the medium is interfering with how we perceive complicated social issues in our youth culture fundamentally: as temporary subjects of discussion, mere flavours of the day.

Consider Tinder. Tinder posits an ideal that the Right Way to find potential mates is by sifting through a sea of options, like food items on a menu card, and expressing interest in many of these options in bulk, purely on the basis of their appearance and presented personality — without the knowledge of the other party’s interest in return. This ideal runs counter to the qualities of compromise and pursuit in traditional romance, perhaps the biggest contributors to the foundations of steady relationships. Tinder’s ideal and metaphor has fed a culture of entitlement and resentment rather than compromise and reflection — a culture of heightened self-victimization rather than awareness of one’s own inadequacies in the dating market. Incel culture is, perhaps, the most eptiomic manifestation of this.

Metaphors change the world on the level of action as well as perception — in addition to providing new insight for functionality, they also open our minds to newer ways of thought, newer ideals to strive for.

What seems like deliberate malice can almost always be traced back to misplaced ideals, which in turn can almost always be traced back to flawed metaphors. This is true even on the level of government, as we saw most recently in the case of the presidency of Donald Trump. As George Lakoff pointed out, the central metaphor that he operated on, the core understanding through which he inferred and assessed function, was the notion that “the president is the nation” — an ideal that runs dangerously counter to the foundations of democracy. The whole world watched as this metaphor played out in the United States over the past 4 years.

To close off this series of examples, we might best return to where we began: the metaphor of the bulb. The bulb replaced the Sun, so to speak, and in doing so it changed the way we think about work hours, the way we build our buildings, the way human life itself is organized. But its impact wasn’t merely physical, it also affected how we think about Nature itself: it, along with many other inventions like it, showed us that maybe artificiality can in fact be a replacement for Nature. It helped raise a culture ungrateful to Nature, disconnected from Nature, abusive, even, of Nature.

Thus, in metaphors we find not just where we are coming from and how we see the world, but also where we’re going — what we’re aiming towards. The metaphors with which we construct our worlds don’t just bring the world to life but also assign it value judgements of right and wrong — ideals and apprehensions. Knowingly or unknowingly, metaphors are the tunes to which we come to dance; the backdrops against which we live out our entire lives — the masters playing at the strings of the marionettes that we are. We shape our metaphors, in the image of ourselves, externalizing our perceptions, and we allow these perpetually flawed manifestations from yesterday to play out in the world and guide who we become tomorrow. We shape our metaphors as testaments to the journeys we have traveled, the traditions we have inherited, and the futures that we behold; to wrap up the present, the past, and the future into a single manifestation — to define our place in the world. We shape our metaphors to find what makes us human. We shape our metaphors because if we didn’t, we wouldn’t have a world to live in.

References Inspiration, Further Reading

1. Douglas Ayling, Language can be thought of as metaphor. Is this an appropriate metaphor?
2. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man
3. Karl Fast & Stephen P. Anderson, Figure It Out: Getting from Information to Understanding
4. Wilson Miner, When We Build
5. Vílem Flusser, About the Word Design
6. James J. Gibson, The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception
7. Jenny L. Davis, How Artifacts Afford
8. George Lakoff & Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By
9. George Lakoff, The President Is The Nation: The Central Metaphor Trump Lives By