Metaphors
One design concept that was looked at in class today was creating metaphors. Humans are able to learn through target recognition, where the associate certain objects with their use cases in daily activities. For example, we examined the trash can icon that apple uses on their mac books. Obviously trash cans are used to hold garbage, so it makes sense that people are able to drag their unwanted files to the icon to dispose of them. Interestingly enough, the trash can is empty when there are no files in it, and it is full when there are. The first link below provides more information on how to effectively use metaphors to enhance the design of your product, and the second link is a cool thesis on the topic done by a college student from Tufts:
- http://www.howdesign.com/articles/metaphor/
- https://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=2&cad=rja&uact=8&ved=0ahUKEwjzyZbbp7TLAhUFFz4KHcluA44QFggjMAE&url=http%3A%2F%2Frepository.tudelft.nl%2Fassets%2Fuuid%3Ab7484b0f-9596-4856-ae9d-97c696f9de79%2FNazli_Cila_Thesis.pdf&usg=AFQjCNHzR6UUfcMIseD8g7jKJjDYgFNw7A&sig2=7KxXdqkurCD6sjxihPcrvg