Wrenches and Gears - Setup/SettingsMy living room is currently full of bicycle guts, wrenches, bolts, and screw drivers. This weekend I completely disassembled an old rusted bicycle and spent hours shopping for replacement parts to fix it up. So, uh, yeah, us twenty-something's know what tools are.
Want to indicate Settings or Setup to a twenty something? Show them a tool they've never used in their lives.
PhotographyAnyone who is hipster enough to use Instagram also has that one friend who bought a Polaroid camera and film on eBay and went around to every party for a year using it as a cheap excuse to snap photos of pretty ladies.
No one under 30 has seen a Polaroid in years but we keep using them for icons. Instagram sold for $1B with an icon whose subtlety was lost on its target audience. "Shake it like a Polaroid picture."
The origin of the red and white barber pole is associated with the service of bloodletting and was historically a representation of bloody bandages wrapped around a pole. ... The original pole had a brass wash basin at the top (representing the vessel in which leeches were kept) and bottom (representing the basin that received the blood). The pole itself represents the staff that the patient gripped during the procedure to encourage blood flow.posted by achrise at 8:19 AM on December 10, 2012
In 2003, the French government’s general commission on terminology and neology asked the French to stop using the word ‘email’ and replace it with ‘courriel’, which was already popular in Quebec. The word was added to FranceTerme, and its use expanded.I am also reminded of this really interesting recent story on SignLanguage for STEM, which any future people trying to come up with sensible, and knowable, and logical semiotics for computers should consider
Imagine trying to learn biology without ever using the word “organism.” Or studying to become a botanist when the only way of referring to photosynthesis is to spell the word out, letter by painstaking letter.
In the rest of this article, I ask what it is that we are actually describing by such a juxtaposition. When we propose that a com- puter be presented as a metaphorical office or typewriter, one of the things we are really describing is the intended user of this computer, describing him or her as an office worker or typist. When we designer-researchers in HCI imag- ine a UI to be a work of literature, we are describing ourselves as creative authors rather than mundane technologists. The relationship between users and designers structures the commercial and social context of HCI, and is the basis of our academic and professional discipline. The remainder of this ar- ticle is structured to address these concerns, first in the historical context of desktop development, then commentary on the desktop and other metaphors, and finally, proposals for the way that metaphor should be used as a tool in future.posted by infinite intimation at 11:29 AM on December 10, 2012
randomkeystrike:Demonstrably false, BTW. This convention didn't become fixed until the 20th Century.
In other news, men's coats button a certain way so we can get to swords easier, or so I've been told.
What we call common sense—the body of widely accepted truths—is, just as Heidegger and Nabokov thought, a collection of dead metaphor. Truths are the skeletons which remain after the capacity to arouse the senses—to cause tingles—has been rubbed off by familiarity and long usage. After the scales are rubbed off a butterfly’s wing, you have transparency, but not beauty—formal structure without sensuous content. Once the freshness wears off the metaphor, you have plain, literal, transparent language—the sort of language which is ascribed not to any particular person but to ‘common sense’ or ‘reason’ or ‘intuition’ [Rorty 1989, p. 152]I doubt anyone is meaning to be intentionally hostile to other people (perhaps towards certain idioms and buttons that seem to just not go away [like the frying pan meaning search]); metaphors and symbols we must actively touch and use daily are bound to arouse passions though (I wonder if the need to actually physically touch icons is now changing how long people will passively, quietly put up with symbols that are confusing or annoying).
MrGuilt: A paperless office is as useful as a paperless bathroom.89 million Japanese say "違います".
Someone needs to do a Rear Window parody with the guy obsessively texting his suspicions about his neighbors to facebook or twitter.You know what? That sounds pretty awful.
Someone needs to do a Rear Window parody with the guy obsessively texting his suspicions about his neighbors to facebook or twitter.This is rather brilliant, really, but not as a film. Rather, as a real-time Twitter performance.
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posted by EndsOfInvention at 5:59 AM on December 10, 2012 [28 favorites]