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Embodying Metaphors in Systems
by
Abstract
This study explores the role of metaphor in the system design process. It examines the
ways in which the metaphors that designers use in design conversations become embodied in
the systems that they are creating. It assumes that by making designers aware of their use of
metaphor, they can better cope with the complex and dynamic nature of the challenges
presented in design in a broadly ecological sense. The study focuses on inviting designers to
address the question, How do our joint improvisations with metaphors become embodied in
To create a frame for this collaborative exploration, literatures in system design, metaphor,
metaphor in system design, and organizational improvisation are brought in. Design
project in which three system designers, including the author of this study, created a new
method and a new system with awareness of the role of metaphor in the system design
process, are analyzed. The findings show how persistent improvisations with several
metaphors in the design process result in those metaphors becoming embodied in the system.
Guided by an interpretive analysis of the data and the findings, a review of the literature in
Johnsons (2007) meaning of the body, and Turbaynes (1971) metaphor to myth
transformation follows. Based on the insights emerging from this review, a model for
ii
reflexive reflections-in-interaction with meta-metaphors is created to support system
The model is tested with three episodes from the action research data. The results of that
test suggest that the use of the model could have increased the awareness of the designers in
this case study of metaphor as metaphor. It is assumed that this would have increased their
capacity to consciously generate the system in a way better fit for its purpose. The study
comes full circle by offering three ways to further develop theory, research, and practice to
Key words: system design, embodied realism, social construction, conceptual metaphor,
iii
Copyright by
2016
iv
Author Note
(IT) systems, I discovered the ideas of value networks, intellectual capital, and knowledge
to deeply understand the complexities inherent in these fields, I gathered a band of leading
improvisation. This helped me to better understand how structure and flexibility work
together in each and every moment to help us evolve adaptive structures that foster
In the past eight years, I performed PhD research while embodying the metaphor of
organizational improvisation and its generative capacity for human and organizational
systems. This document shares how I have experienced practice and research flowing
together in those years. My intent was to develop a process and practices that are helpful in
making better systems and in making systems better. I feel I have learned a few things about
this which are worth sharing. And if you have the courage to read this report, I hope you will
Between 2008 and 2013, my research was financially supported by a group of good
friends, all Dutch entrepreneurs, trying to change our systems for the better: Kalo Bagijn;
Ronald Heerema; Herman van Middendorp; Marielle Sijgers and Ronald van den Hoff with
CDEF Holding: http://www.cdefholding.nl; and Charles van Gogh with Mise en Place:
http://www.mep.nl.
v
In 2013-2014, I had the honor to serve as a research fellow with the CMM institute for
vi
Acknowledgements
There are many people who have been guides on this quest, and I am deeply thankful to
highlight, first, the support of my wife, Thekla, and our kids, Sterre and Stijn, who
understood that this is my way, and who have always actively supported me in both good and
bad times during the process of making this and who have sacrificed many moments of our
Next, I want to thank Indranil Bhattacharya and Andr Kampert and all our colleagues in
Coena and Product Foundry during the time of the creation of Embodied Making and
Business Elements for engaging in this study with their full selves. Of course, I am also
deeply thankful to all the clients that trusted us to try out our emerging method with them.
During my Fielding journey, many faculty and friends have helped me shape this study,
especially Annabelle Nelson, Thierry Pauchant, Keith Melville, Barnett Pearce, Aliki
Nicolaides, Nancy Wallis, Dorothy Agger-Gupta, David Willis, Andrea Mc Kenna, Petrina
McGrath, Paula Rowland, Romi Boucher, Bart Beuchner, John Inman, John Baugus,
Deborah Scott, and Alex Yu. And of course, my dissertation committee: Fred Steier, Frank
Further, I want to thank the research supporters who have made this a financially feasible
project, because they believed in me and in my capacity to create something valuable for
them and for their organizations: Kalo Bagijn, Johan Burgemeester, Charles van Gogh,
Roland Hameeteman, Ronald van den Hoff, and my father, Herman van Middendorp. I also
want to thank the CMM Institute for Personal and Social Evolution who, together with
vii
Fielding Graduate University and Villanova University, awarded me with a CMM fellowship
I also want to thank Verna Allee, Charles Savage, and Oliver Schwabe for being guides on
my way to Fielding Graduate University. And the jazzinbusiness band who taught me much
about improvising during our years of bringing the jazz metaphor to life in organizations:
Paul Berner, Sylvi Lane, my brother Armand van Middendorp, and Folkert Oosting.
Also, I am thankful for the inspiration from my colleagues in the core teams and on the
boards of the Institute for Global Integral Competence and to my fellow boardmembers at the
Thanks also to Alana Saltz; your help in editing the final product was invaluable.
And finally, I want to thank my mother, Mina van de Nadort, who always said I should be
a professor and who made me believe that I could choose to do anything, and my father,
Herman van Middendorp, who showed by example what it means to study and develop
yourself while working and being part of your family at the same time.
viii
Table of Contents
Introduction ............................................................................................................. 22
Metaphor ................................................................................................................. 30
Summary ................................................................................................................. 52
The Case of the Development of Embodied Making and Business Elements ........ 59
Research Design...................................................................................................... 83
ix
Identifying the Breakthrough Moments in the Design Session Recordings
(Stepping 3)............................................................................................................. 95
Reflecting on the Analysis, the Design Artifacts, and the System (Stepping 7) ..... 99
Performing an Initial Analysis to Test and Refine the Method (Stepping 9) ........ 100
Fact-Finding About the Results of This Cycle (Stepping 10) ............................... 102
Using NVivo to Code and Analyze the Data (Stepping 11) .................................. 113
Using NVivo to Code the Research Teams Own Findings and Discussions
(Stepping 12)..........................................................................................................119
(Stepping 13)..........................................................................................................119
Using NVivo to Organize the Options for Discussion (Stepping 15) ................... 120
Choosing the Most Present Options for Discussion (Stepping 16)....................... 121
Writing the First Full Draft of the Dissertation (Stepping 17) .............................. 126
x
Partial Perspectives on Metaphor.......................................................................... 134
xi
Testing the Model with the Data (Cycle E) .......................................................... 209
xii
List of Figures
Figure 1: Action Inquiry's Meshing Territories of Experience and How its Three Perspectives
Figure 2: Timeline of Key Episodes in the Embodied Making and Business Elements Design
Figure 4: 37 Signals's Ryan Singer Presents How He Uses Alexander in His Design
Method67
Figure 5: Selected Forces, F(x), from the Design Context of a Contact Management
System ..................................................................................................................................69
Figure 8: Some Force Interactions in the River of Forces of an Online Car Marketplace in
India ....................................................................................................................................73
Lobby ...................................................................................................................................74
Figure 10: Sergej's Hexagon Ideas and a Short Analysis of Forces for Embodied Making
Itself ....................................................................................................................................76
Figure 11: Indranil's Application of Hexagons to Organize Solutions for the Dutch
Figure 13: Andrs Hexagon Design that We Selected for the Embodied Making IT
System.77
xiii
Figure 14: Embodied Making System Prototype October 2013 ..............................................79
Figure 17: Embodied Making Bta Version After Redesign (Copyright Product Foundry)....82
Figure 18: Business Elements System with Embodied Making Results of the Farmer's River
Figure 20: Illustration of Action Inquiry Analysis of Several Turns in the Reflection with
Indranil ..............................................................................................................................101
Figure 21: Action Inquiry's Four Territories of Experience Used to Reflect Further on the
Figure 23: Illustration of Coding in Transcripts to Refer to Data (Recordings and Design
Figure 29: Detailed Breakdown of Topics Related to the Literature Review ........................125
Figure 30: Conventional Way of Displaying Source and Target Domains in Embodied
Realism .............................................................................................................................153
Figure 31: Venn Diagram that Includes the Context of Target Domain ................................156
xiv
Figure 32: Two Interpenetrating Spirals ................................................................................157
Figure 34: Taiji as Two Koi Representing Yin and Yang in a More Dynamic Way ..............160
Figure 38: Andr's Hexagon Design for Embodied Making System .....................................173
Figure 39: My Handwritten Notes of Embodied Making Design Session on April 13,
2012...................................................................................................................................174
Figure 40: Web Logo for Embodied Making Site by Indranil ...............................................175
Figure 41: Particle Language Based on Sowa's Ontology for Business Elements System ...176
Figure 42: Hotel Lobby Canvas for Embodied Making Session ...........................................183
Figure 43: Several Forces Instantiated on a Hotel Lobby Metaphor Canvas ........................184
Figure 44: Business Elements Version 1.0 with Embodied Making Analysis of Farmers'
Workshop ..........................................................................................................................185
Figure 46: Andr's Artifact for the Design of an Embodied Making System ........................193
xv
CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTION
We need to increase our awareness of the role and the power of metaphors in the system
design process. If we understand how the metaphors that designers use in design
conversations become embodied in the systems that they are creating, our systems can be
redesigned to better cope with the complex and dynamic nature of the problems and
Metaphor, as I use it here, means that a concept that has a concrete meaning in one
context is used to help us make sense of another context. For example, when we go to the
desktop of our personal computer systems, we use the more concrete concept of a physical
desktop to help us make sense of the more abstract concept of a personal computers system
for organizing data in a coherent way for users of that system. Or when we use Adam
Smith's (1796) idea of an invisible hand to make sense of the effect that an economic system
produces more wealth if every participant in that system looks after their own interest than
would be expected.
The systems that we currently use often embody metaphors that were used by their
erstwhile designers while creating those systems. Where these metaphors and the resulting
systems were valuable in their own day and time, they fail to adequately address the
complexity of our issues today. Success in the redesign of systems depends on the designers
conscious awareness of the often unwanted and undesired embodied metaphors in the old
system and on their ability to generate the required and desired metaphors for the new
system. The more aware designers become of the metaphors embodied in the system they
are trying to change, the better able they become at generating the metaphors through which
But often designers are not aware of the metaphors embodied in the system that they are
trying to change, nor are designers always consciously aware of the potential of the role of
metaphors in generating the new system. As a result, they either fail to produce a system that
adequately addresses the design challenge, or they inadvertently sustain, or even amplify, the
undesirable effects of current systems. Our growing knowledge of the persistent and
systematic role that metaphor plays in our being and doing throws a new light on these
issues.
A growing number of studies, based on Lakoff and Johnson's (1980, 1999) notions of
conceptual metaphor and embodied realism, show us that we mostly conceive of our reality
metaphorically and nonconsciously (Crawford, 2009; Kille, Forest, & Wood, 2013; Morris,
Sheldon, Ames, & Young, 2007; Sullivan, 2015; Zhong & Leonardelli, 2008). Another
number of studies, based on Schn's (1993, 2011) notion of generative metaphor, examine
how we use metaphor generatively to consciously create new systems (Barrett &
Cooperrider, 1990; Barrett, Thomas, & Hocevar, 1995; Bright, Powley, Fry, & Barrett, 2013;
Casakin, 2012; Kelly, 2014; Madsen, 1988, 1994). It is in this estuary of nonconsciously
experienced conceptual context and consciously generated creativity where designers work to
make new systems. The question of how designers create new systems in this estuary of the
conscious and nonconscious has been approached in a number of ways, most prominently as
reflection-in-action (Kinsella, 2007; Schn, 1983; Yanow & Tsoukas, 2009) and more
recently as generative capacity (Avital & Teeni, 2009; Van Osch, 2013; Van Osch & Avital,
2010).
Metaphors, once consciously generative to the creation of our systems, have become
hidden beneath the surface of the everyday use of systems that we consider normal. Scholars
3
have pointed out this movement of metaphors from the conscious to the nonconscious
(Turbayne, 1971) and their lifecycle from novel, to conventional, to dead (Lakoff, 1987).
Others have explored the cognitively unconscious dimensions of metaphor (Johnson, 2007,
2014). Critical metaphor analyzers explicitly or implicitly argue for us to become aware of
metaphors that have gone offline in order to address issues of design and power in our
systems (Barrett & Sarbin, 2007; Charteris-Black, 2013; Peterson, 2009; Rohrer & Vignone,
From this short and high-level overview of the role of metaphor in system design, several
questions emerge. How do designers make sense of the limitations and problems in the
current systems? How aware are they of the metaphorical nature of those problems and
limitations? How do they think and talk about the design of the new systems that they are
creating to address today's challenges? How do they take changes to current systems into
account when designing the new? How do they choose and use generative metaphors to help
them make sense of the requirements for the new systems? And are they aware of forgotten
stories and hidden metaphors in the systems they try to change, and how these may be
holding them back from achieving their goals with the new system?
For example, consider the short exchange below. It is part of a longer conversation
between Indranil Bhattacharya and myself. Indranil and I were co-founders, together with
Andr Kampert, of Product Foundry, a company that produces software products that help
people in organizations work collaboratively with large amounts of data in complex contexts.
We are on Skype, a real-time chat service, after a working day in which we talked about our
Indranil Bhattacharya (I): How did you phrase it, Sergej? On intellectual property?
The thing you do is different from the way the thing is represented?
4
Sergej van Middendorp (S): Intellectual property is based on the conceptual metaphor
knowledge is stuff. So the entailment of the metaphor is that it makes us believe
that the knowledge is in the stuff, and that therefore you can protect it. A more
embodied view would show that knowledge is both in the stuff, and in the ways
people interact with the stuff. So separate a developer from the code. Or a designer
from the design. Where does the knowledge go? Into the stuff, or into the person?
Knowledge from this paradigm is relational. It is in the code and with the
developers working the code. For example, when we say we want the best talent to
work on business elements, we make a conscious choice to go open source,
because we understand that this is the only way that talent is going to touch it. Not
talent we hire, but talent that is attracted to the Mars mission. So in making that
decision, we already (unconsciously?) apply a different metaphor for knowledge.
Knowledge is a situation, in which objects and processes act together. Makes
sense? A thing you can control. That gives comfort to those living in the
knowledge is stuff paradigm. But that paradigm may be strong in our conscious
experience. We now know (and smart leaders have always known) that a relational
view is more realistic.
I: Great stuff. Makes great sense. All material we can use. I put the updated version1
on the Dropbox folder. Page 42-50. We can describe a lot of these things as forces.
Property = Land Ownership metaphor.
S: Yes, we know our landowners ;-)
This short conversation is exemplary of the process that I studied in this dissertation. It
starts with a question (How did you phrase intellectual property again?), which lingered
after an earlier conversation during the same systems design process. It prompted my turn,
which contrasts two conceptual metaphors for knowledge (KNOWLEDGE IS STUFF and
has a fit with two existing ways for sharing knowledge in organizations (intellectual property
and open source). The fragment itself contains both nonconsciously and consciously used
used to generate new meaning for the design of the system (KNOWLEDGE IS
1
Indranil refers to an updated version of the design documentation for the system we are developing.
2
For the notation of conceptual metaphors, I use capitals as is the general practice in the field.
5
way into the design of our system (pp. 42-50 of the updated version in the Dropbox folder).
As designers, Indranil and I want our software product, which we called Business Elements,
to embody certain and specific metaphors that are in line with our intent: to radically and
profoundly change organizational information technology systems. To bring home that point,
at the end of our conversation, Indranil invokes the spirit of the landowners from The Grapes
PROPERTY IS LAND.
This short conversation also presents the elements that form the design of this research
study, which aims to answer the question, How do our joint improvisations with metaphors
This study takes three different perspectives on metaphor in an attempt to understand how
they work and how they can be worked in the process of system design. The first, which I
embodied mind and the cognitive unconscious in interaction with others and a complex
environment (Johnson, 2007; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999). The second, which I frame as
generative means through which we deliberately create new realities, including new systems
3
The section of The Grapes of Wrath in which the landowners come to tell the farmers to get off the
land is masterful in its display of metaphor use. The landowners own the land of the farmers through
loans extended by the bank. In talking with the tenants, the bank is generated as a monster that
breathes profits and eats interest to survive, and that the men who make the bank cannot control it. See
also the extended quotation on page 38.
6
(Barrett & Cooperrider, 1990; Gergen, 2009; Schn, 1993, 2011). The third takes a critical
perspective on the deliberate and non-deliberate use of metaphor and tries to uncover the
possible effects of our use of metaphor or our being used by metaphor (Barrett & Sarbin,
2007; Sarbin, 2003; G. Steen, 2014; Turbayne, 1971). These three perspectives do not
exclude one another; rather, they are complementary views on the same phenomenon. The
differences between the three are what make them valuable in understanding their roles and
power in the design process of new systems. The unique contribution of embodied realism is
to show us the workings of the embodied mind and the cognitive unconscious; the unique
contribution of the social constructionist view is to show how our conscious and deliberate
use of metaphor can help generate new experiences and systems; and the unique contribution
of the critical perspective on metaphor is to keep us awake to the limitations of theory and to
show us what can happen when metaphors move between the cognitive conscious and
unconscious, and what can happen when one party to the conversation is aware of the
How do we, as designers, assert our conscious creativity to design in this complex
metaphor, of using metaphors or being used by metaphors in our design conversations? How
aware are we of the metaphors embodied in our cognitive unconscious, in our relationships
with each other, in our environments, including the systems that we are attempting to change
with our design efforts? Awareness of the metaphorical nature of design conversations, and
awareness of how the metaphors used in these conversations become embodied in the
systems that are being created, is a way of finding answers to these questions.
7
Three major ways in which metaphors show up in conversation emerged from the theory
and research introduced in this chapter. There is the deliberate and conscious use of
language, which the embodied realists claim sustains an existing, conventional reality, and
the critical perspective that helps us to surface those embodied, hidden metaphors to
consciousness.
If we place these three perspectives in the context of the conversations that designers have
while designing new systems, or when trying to change existing systems, we can become
aware of their power to create these systems and of metaphor's power to prevent us from
changing systems. This is especially relevant for designers aiming to create systems that
address problems in our current systems and who want these systems to help us create a
better world. In my preparations for this study, I felt that the joint power of the embodied
realism perspective and the social constructionist perspectives on metaphor could help
designers to do just that. Where social construction and cognitive science contradicted each
other in the past, the knowledge that is emerging from recent research in these two different
scholarly perspectives shows that social construction and cognitive science actually reinforce
each other. This convergence of social construction and cognitive science is discussed by a
growing community of scholars who try to build bridges between the seemingly
incommensurable paradigms of nature and nurture, the empirical and the cultural; between
constructivism, structuralism, social construction, and semiotics on the one hand and
cognitive science from the perspective of the embodied mind on the other (Flanik, 2011;
8
2012).
By alternating between the leading edges of our knowledge as developed from the
premises of social construction and embodied realism, designers have the possibility to use
enrich cognitive science's empirical generalizations with the unique, situated, personal, and
cultural perspectives derived at through methods rooted in the humanities. As a result of this
fusion, designers can bring more integral awareness to their tasks, shed nonconscious
metaphors that keep us trapped in unwanted patterns of reality, and help us make systems that
Defining Systems
In this dissertation, I conceive of systems as all possible outcomes of human activity. This
definition of system is narrower than the definition of a system in general systems theory
(Von Bertalanffy, 1969) and cybernetics (Wiener, 1948), which include both human,
organizational, and natural systems and their workings. A definition of system that comes
closer to how I want to use it in this study is provided by Luhmann (1995), who suggests the
term social systems be used for systems created in human beings. These systems can be
broad, globally used systems like the economy, law, art, healthcare, agriculture, and industry.
These systems were created by human beings in social interaction and, through the lens that
Luhmann provides, are recursively generated by human beings. At the same time, they have
(IT) system, a specific kind of social system defined by the Association of Computing
...in its broadest sense encompasses all aspects of computing technology. IT, as an
academic discipline, is concerned with issues related to advocating for users and
meeting their needs within an organizational and societal context through the
selection, creation, application, integration and administration of computing
technologies. (Lunt et al., 2008, p. 9)
IT, according to this definition, concerns the development, both theoretical and applied, of
cover the areas needed to deliver on the definition above. Another definition that helps frame
my definition of system in the context of this study is that of new media. Lister et al. define
new media as
Both of these definitions provide a view of system broad enough to include the process of
system design and the elements that go into and come out of that process.
Our current ways of creating and using systems are stuck in unsustainable dualities. On
the one hand, we have systems based on modern philosophies, architectures, and
technologies. These systems, often created for use in organizations that are centrally
governed through legal entities, assume rational control over data and information, top-down
implementation, and use of the system. In this paradigm, projects to create systems,
according to leading analysts in the industry, keep failing despite more than 50 years of
history and countless methodologies, advice and books (Carlton, 2014, Summary, para. 1).
A key reason for this that I recognize in my own 20 years of industry experience as a
consultant leading the process of systems design and implementation in organizations is the
On the other hand, we have new media systems based on the networked computer and the
smart phone, like those currently provided by Apple, Facebook, and Google. These systems
have done much to help people outside the modern organization leverage their power by
allowing them to activate their social networks. In September 2015, the Dutch weblog,
Geenstijl, used different social media networks to easily surpass the minimum of 300,000
association agreement between the EU and Ukraine supported by the Dutch government
already ratified by the 27 other EU country governments. Social media also played an
important role in activating enough people to support the decision of the United Kingdom to
leave the European Union, and in addressing a large enough group of people in specific states
to vote for Donald Trump in the 2016 presidential election in the United States. These are
just a few of many examples of how people use IT to share knowledge and become more
powerful in their relationships with traditional power centers like the government. At the
same time, people working in large, centrally governed organizations, like governments and
globally operating businesses, use new media systems to become more powerful in those
complex contexts, for example by analyzing social networks to identify insurgency leaders
11
and rounding them up to deflate emergent protests (Siegele, 2016) and by embracing cloud
computing, a recent trend that lets people and organizations store and share their
information on the internet instead of on their local computer systems. But in general,
rationalism and have a hard time adapting to the emerging, networked will of the people.
We are also witnessing the rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics in IT with the
beating the world champion in Go, a strategy game that knows 10250 possible moves, more
than there are particles in the known universe (A Game-Changing Result, 2016) and by the
appointment of an AI system with full voting rights to a management team at the public
Finnish company, Tieto, in October 2016 (Tieto the first Nordic, 2016). In order to beat
the world champion, AlphaGo had to mimic human intuition instead of being able to rely
solely on brute computing power. One reason to appoint AI to the board at Tieto is that an AI
system can process much more data that a human being is able to. The expectation is that AI
will at least add a new and surprising perspective to the management teams conversations
and decision making. We also see robots increasingly able to mimic human behavior, even
improvising music in ways that a human audience finds acceptable (Hoffman & Weinberg,
2011). Even though these highly specialized programs show great promise for the future
capabilities of systems, more generic capabilities of artificial intelligence remain distant, with
robots still tripping and falling during the simplest of human tasks (After the Fall, 2015).
Based on the yearly Loebner prize to test AI in random chats of 10 minutes set up according
to the Turing test, no computer has yet convinced as many humans that the computers are
human as Turing predicted in 1950 (Loebner 2013 Leaderboard Results, 2013; Turing,
12
1950). Nevertheless, the popular media have presented the changing relationships between
humans and systems in thought-provoking ways, recently in feature movies like HER (Jonze,
2014) and Transcendence (Marter & Pfister, 2014). In politics and media, we find
discussions about the coming structural change to the market for white-collar workers and to
the perils of artificial intelligence for citizens in states with autocratic regimes (The Dawn of
Artificial Intelligence, 2015). The implicit and unproductive duality of people vs.
The list of innovations that emerge from IT goes on and on, including the Internet of
Things, the sharing economy, big data, 3D printing, smart cities, and virtual reality. The point
of my introduction is not so much to be complete in identifying trends, but to point out that
the gap between the possibilities that IT affords and our capabilities as human beings is
widening. It is also not to choose which side to support: those who believe that IT can never
be as intelligent as human beings, or those who support theories like the singularity theorem
intelligence with potential unfathomable effects for humanity. There are differing
perspectives on these developments, and there are tensions between the real world
complexities that these developments generate and the ways that people organize to deal with
them. It is my intent to show that, underneath these surface phenomena, there is a deeper
way of nonconscious thought that both frames how we can think about these issues and
tensions that may afford us ways to better deal with them if we were to understand them
better. Peterson (2009), for example, did a great job at surfacing the nonconscious metaphors
that engineers at MIT's media lab used to conceive of Human 2.0 and critically analyzed the
power of these metaphors in attracting finance for their further development. My intent is to
13
build on such metaphor surfacing and to offer practical ways to work with them more
Imagine being able to see how we embody metaphors that nonconsciously determine how
we think about things, and using that knowledge to consciously and deliberately form our
systems in ways that are conducive to our highest potential as human beings. Imagine the
ability to consciously assess the systems design process by surfacing hidden metaphors,
critically analyzing them, and then redesigning them before they become embodied in an
upgraded version of our system. I see great potential, especially if we think about the
Contextual Literatures
To provide a context for the core concepts of metaphor and IT, I will review in more
improvisation. These three literatures situate the more focused topics of metaphors and IT,
and they also help us to situate the case study that provided the data for this study through a
three-year action research project, in which the metaphor of jazz improvisation was a
conscious frame for the design of an IT system that aimed to specifically support the
non-linear nature of the context and helps us to act into these contexts while preserving their
inherent complexity (Corning, 2002; Kurtz & Snowden, 2003; Mitchell, 2009; Stacey, 2001;
understand the crystallization process of metaphors from their volatile form in conversation,
to their fluid form in systems designs, to their coagulated form in actual IT.
14
The literature in system design, specifically in its recent form of design thinking, aims to
help managers and other nondesigners understand design skills and processes to create
products and organizations that have a better fit with the contexts in which they are used
Woodilla, & etinkaya, 2013; Kimbell, 2011, 2012.; Martin, 2009; Schn, 1983; Simon,
1996). The literature in system design, and in design thinking, provides a context to situate
this study in a broader way of thinking about the design process, which is the central activity
studied in this dissertation. In addition, some of the literature in design thinking has directly
influenced the process and the system developed in the case studied in this dissertation,
particularly the work of Christopher Alexander and colleagues, who aimed to bring life back
to architecture (Alexander, 1964, 1979, 2002; Alexander, Ishikawa, & Silverstein, 1977).
Organizational Improvisation
In addition to the literatures on metaphor and system design, reviews of which are
metaphor for complexity and emergence in organizations and systems. This review provides
us with a way, reflexive of this dissertation's topic, to understand the complexity and
emergence in the contexts that current systems fail to address adequately. This literature also
helps to situate the case study that provided the data for this study through a three-year action
research project in which the metaphor of jazz improvisation itself was a conscious frame for
the design of an IT system that aimed to specifically support the complexity of human
processes in organizations.
Hadida, Tarvainen, & Rose, 2015; K. N. Kamoche, Pina e Cunha, & Vieira da Cunha, 2002;
15
design in an organizational setting like the one studied in this dissertation. The literature in
the context and helps us to act into these contexts while preserving their inherent complexity
(Corning, 2002; Kurtz & Snowden, 2003; Mitchell, 2009; Stacey, 2001; Tarride, 2013). I
think that some understanding of complexity/emergence will also help us to understand the
crystallization process of metaphors from their volatile form in conversation, to their fluid
form in systems designs, to their coagulated form in actual IT. The complexity and
emergence in the design process examined in this study was deliberately guided by the
was also a deliberate input for the system that was designed. My own seven years of
experience with the metaphor of organizational improvisation in workshops with a jazz band4
were foundational to our choice to design a system with a jazz architecture. I also intend to
use the metaphor of organizational improvisation to reflect from time to time on the process
Improvising a Dissertation
Barrett & Peplowski, 1998). Minimal structure affords coordination around similarities
while leaving enough ambiguity and space for improvisations in which that structure is
4
Between 2005 and 2012, I performed around 25 workshops with a band, jazzinbusiness, that I had
gathered to help leaders in organizations experience the metaphor of jazz improvisation in the contexts of
collaboration, complexity, innovation, design, and other pertinent topics of management. The workshop was
based on Barrett's seven characteristics of jazz improvisation as described in Creativity and Improvisation in
Jazz and Organization (Barrett, 1998).
16
innovated and changed. The key minimal structure in jazz improvisation is the song. The
song is a coherent whole of chord changes and melody, the basic pattern of which is shared
and assumed knowledge between experienced jazz musicians. This shared knowledge of the
song constrains players to know where everyone should be at any point in time and what
should happen next in a performance. Paradoxically, the minimal structure thereby creates
the conditions for each performer to create unique interpretations, embellishments, and
variations of the song. As long as the musicians create a groove strong enough to hold their
joint departures from the structure, even the structure itself may be subject to change. At the
same time, the identity of the song as a whole will remain coherent in some way and is
In this study, I improvised on the minimal structure of the traditional six-chapter doctoral
My improvisations on this structure retain this overall form as a movement from question to
answer. It improvises on the structure from Chapter 4 onwards by going through the cycle of
finding, discussing, and concluding several times instead of once. I did not linearly pass
through those chapters each time around but alternated between the perspectives that each
chapter takes. With each turn of the cycle, I alternated between literatures, weaved across
their overlaps, changed methods and techniques, alternated between finding, discussing, and
concluding, and wondered about the questions and the literature again. These alternations
were intertwined with streaks of writing, sharing with my chair and with my committee,
receiving responses that provoked new insights, thoughts, questions, searches, reviews, and
designing the system that is subject to this study with a team of co-researchers (an action
17
research perspective) and my colleague business partners (a practice perspective of the same
people). Interim findings from the dissertation process informed the designing, and that
designing, in turn, provided data for the process of creating the dissertation. As a result of all
this, I find the complex relationship between this minimal structure and the messy process
that followed from it, and that (re)created it, important to highlight.
A benefit of minimal structure is that it helps to provide coherence to the messy process
that creates it. A risk of minimal structure is that it retrospectively hides the process of its
creation to the extent that we tend to fool ourselves into thinking that the process of creation
itself was as structured as its outcome makes it appear to be. Also, the form of the doctoral
student-authored dissertation hides the fact that it is a highly collaborative process between
researcher, co-researchers, and many others involved, either directly or indirectly. This is not
a problem if the structure solely serves to report the outcome. But if, as is the case with this
dissertation, the process of joint creation and its relationship to structural outcomes are
central topics, it does matter. Schn (1963/2011), for example, describes how we
retrospectively only remember the linear transformation we make when we displace one
concept to another. When he learned that polishing is actually a sort of scratching5, the
learning not only changed his concept of polishing but also his concept of scratching. This
learning is not the linear application of scratching to polishing, but a complex interaction
between the two that changes both concepts at the same time, even if the one is directed at
better understanding the other. This direction, in retrospect, orders and filters the process to
reflect its outcome as if we had always known it. We forget the change that happened to
our concept of scratching and remember the change that happened to our concept of
5
In the process of polishing, very small scratches, invisible to the human senses of eye and touch, are
made to a surface, thereby making it appear smoother than before the scratching.
18
polishing. Possibly, this happens because our focus was on understanding the concept of
polishing, and the concept of scratching was only a means for understanding what we were
focused on, just like we forget about the interactional process of learning between our hands
and the walls of a cave when we use a stick for sensing our way in the dark. Once we know
how to use the stick, we forget about it and it becomes our hand (Bateson, 2000; Polanyi,
1967).
This realization was intuitively important for me at the start of this dissertation process,
and now I can use these examples to support this intuition with concepts from the literature,
displaced in time (I found them after I was supposed to write this, and they are not part of
earlier versions of this introduction) and space (they should appear in Chapter 5, and they do,
but they also appear here to make the point I am using them to make here). With the risk of
overdoing this in mind, I intend to provide reflections on the process of the creation of the
dissertation where it matters to the research question and to show how this dissertation was
improvised in several turns, keeping two major cycles alive in its structural outcome as much
as possible. I hope this will provide insights into the creation process of the chapters you are
about to read and illuminate how the metaphor of jazz improvisation is embodied in the
process and system of this dissertation as an authentic expression of the topic that this
From here, this dissertation unfolds in two major turns of literature review, method
explication, findings provision, and findings discussion before arriving at a conclusion and
reflection. The first turn is an action research project that answers the question. The second
turn is an interpretation of the data generated by the action research project that tries at a
19
second time of answering the research question. As I held off the desire to retrospectively
rewrite Chapter 2 after the dissertation process was complete, the first literature review, in
Chapter 2, may feel thin to those at home in one or more of the literatures reviewed. I like to
think I make up for that in the second cycle of review provided in Chapter 6, which dives
deeply into several of those literatures to help us understand what the data of the case study
Chapter 3 reports my research approach, methods, and techniques as they were used in the
cycles of data gathering and analysis. Some of the methods I planned to use were
complemented with other methods and techniques retrospectively to highlight the findings.
The research approach for this dissertation was action research (Greenwood & Levin, 2007;
Reason & Bradbury, 2001, 2008), and the specific methods that I used to give form to the
research process were action inquiry (Torbert, 2001, 2004; Torbert & Taylor, 2008), the
coordinated management of meaning (CMM; Barge & Pearce, 2004; W. B. Pearce, 2007; W.
B. Pearce & Cronen, 1980), and conceptual metaphor analysis (Andriessen & Gubbins, 2009;
In retrospect, the first turn of this research was true to the premises of action research: an
equal relationship between researcher and research participants, of direct value to the
practical situation of the research participants and aware of the need to select a mix of
complementary methods and techniques to fit the research question, context, and data.
Together with two business partners, I set out on a process to design a new method and
system, and we all knew that we wanted this process to be informed by the leading edge of
theory and research in improvisation, metaphor, and systems design. We also strived to have
the process reflect the improvisational nature of human and organizational processes, and we
20
wanted the system to embody this improvisational nature. We also aspired for the process to
After the first turn of research and system design was completed and the first results could
be discussed, my business partners and I decided to end our business partnership and to move
second turn. The way that the second turn formed was guided more by the idea of reflecting
on action and by the process of using the findings to guide research of the relevant literatures
to surface new theoretical understanding and potential practical applications. This approach
is sometimes referred to as grounded theory (Bryant & Charmaz, 2010; Glaser & Strauss,
1999), and even if the process that I followed could be framed that way, I also conceived of it
as the drawing from, and the building of, a case study (Yin, 2009) and as a process of design
science (Van Aken, 2005; Van Aken & Romme, 2009). I rigorously analyzed the findings
using NVivo, a qualitative research software product, to make a detailed picture of our
conversations and their relationship with the design artifacts and the actual method and
system emerging from the designing at every step of the three-year process that generated the
data. I reflected on those results from different perspectives and went back to the literature to
help make sense of the data. This second turn resulted in the outline of a reflective practice
for becoming aware of the power of metaphor in the design of systems. The two turns evolve
Chapter 4 reports the key findings, selected for their ability to express the depth and
breadth of findings using the procedure laid out in Chapter 3. These findings illustrate how
we, as a research team, answer the research question ourselves, and it has my reflections on
Chapter 5 reports on the options for discussion that emerge from a complete analysis of
the findings and discusses the three most important options in some detail in the context of
Chapter 6 reflects on the findings and the options for discussion and reports on the second
round of literature review; it dives deeper into the three perspectives on metaphor and
discusses reflection-in-action as a process that we can use to contextualize the design process
Chapter 7 takes the outcomes of the second literature review and inductively surfaces a
Chapter 8 uses three episodes from the data to test the model to see how it may help us to
Chapter 9 provides a conclusion and reflections on the validity and limitations of the
Introduction
This study seeks to answer the question, How do our joint improvisations with metaphors
become embodied in the systems that we are creating? The our in the question refers to
organization that designs and creates products for sensemaking and collaboration in complex
environments in which I was a partner between 2009 and 20146. This dissertation studies the
case of Product Foundry as our team goes through a full cycle of designing a method and a
system while remaining consciously aware of the working of metaphors in systems design
processes. Specific metaphors that we used to guide our systems design process were jazz
improvisation (Barrett, 1998, 2012), constructive communication (W. B. Pearce, 1989, 2007;
W. B. Pearce & Cronen, 1980), and living architecture (Alexander, 1964, 1979, 2002;
Alexander et al., 1977)7. Even though this study is limited by an in-depth investigation into
the findings of one particular case, understanding more about how metaphors play out in
design is important for human beings in general because we are all system designers in some
aspect of our lives. For instance, when we organize our work with others, when we setup our
workplaces, when we configure our computer systems and software, and when we craft the
agenda for our next meeting, we are all designing systematic solutions for working together
to achieve a purpose. In Product Foundry, we were more specifically tasked with designing
and creating information technology products that will be used by large numbers of users. In
such a particular context, the practice of designing may be more specific and formal than in
6
Product Foundry's predecessors, Coena and PerfectArch, were merged into Product Foundry in 2013.
For purposes of simplicity, I refer to Product Foundry, the current company name to represent the three, which
were cofounded and led by Indranil Bhattacharya, Andr Kampert, and me.
7
For a detailed discussion of these three metaphors as we used them, see Van Middendorp, 2012.
23
the generic examples above. Nevertheless, both human beings in general and our particular
team work on different parts of the same spectrum where the designing, creating, and using
of systematic solutions is part of everyday life. In order to provide a rich context for
understanding the case study that will provide data to inquire into the research question, I
will review the literature on systems design and focus on the design of IT in particular.
As the overall question guiding this study shows, I presume that metaphor is a key
concept in systems design. Specifically, I assume that the metaphors people use in discourse
while designing systems will become embodied in the system that they are creating. I
believe this is true both for those metaphors that are used consciously and deliberately, and
for those metaphors that are used unintentionally and mostly nonconscious. Therefore, after
reviewing the literature in design, I review the literature in metaphor, specifically the
literature in embodied realism and the literature in generative metaphor theory, to help us
understand the duality between nonconscious, embodied metaphors and deliberately used
I also assume that the systems design context is complex and that the process of design is
emergent. Therefore, I will review some of the literature in complexity and emergence, and I
was one of the key inputs for the design process and outcomes examined in this research
study.
The becoming embodied part of the research question refers to the transition of
metaphors from conversations to systems. The nature of systems design is that ideas that
systems designers talk about transfer from them as persons in conversation with each other to
24
become embodied in the systems that they create in those conversations, which, as they are
completed, result in disembodied objects out in the world. Specifically, this study assumes
that the metaphors that designers used to generate coherence in their design conversations
about the system will become embodied in what remains after those conversations are
finished and the designers went home. But the becoming embodied process works in the
other direction as well. The metaphors available for designers to use in the design of new
environment with existing systems. And in turn, the system that they are creating will
become available to others to support such interactions, bringing the metaphors they
embodied in the system into the embodied minds of their users. In assuming this, I am
claiming that the freedom of designers to create their systems is both enabled and limited by
metaphors.
System Design
System design has been defined by Fielden as the use of scientific principles, technical
pre-specified functions with the maximum economy and efficiency (as quoted in Walls,
Widmeyer, & El Sawy, 1992, p. 36), and as a prescriptive theory based on theoretical
underpinnings which says how a design process can be carried out in a way which is both
effective and feasible (Walls et al., 1992, p. 36). The first definition names the inputs
(scientific principles, technical information, imagination), the process (definition), and the
outcomes (structure, machine or system) and the value (specified functions, maximum
economy, efficiency), while the second names the process (how to carry out a design process
according to a prescriptive theory) with a research base that defines a criterion for the
25
outcomes of that process (effective) and for the costs of producing that outcome (feasible).
This definition promotes the understanding of systems design as a duality between process
and outcomes and gives a first foundational grasp of the concept, but its theoretical focus also
provides a false sense of simplicity and control. In my own experience, systems design is not
as clear cut as Walls et al. have it. Therefore, it makes sense to add some additional
perspectives to do justice to both the huge amount of research on the topic and to complexify
the concept to include more of the real-life challenges that systems design studies.
In a review focused on the process of information systems design, closer to the context of
the case study in this dissertation, Hevner et al. (2004), conceive of information systems
design as a process guided by two literatures: behavioral science and design science. Hevner
et al. say that, In the design-science paradigm, knowledge and understanding of a problem
domain and its solution are achieved in the building and application of the designed artifact
(Hevner, March, Park, & Ram, 2004, p. 75). This definition focuses our attention more on
designing as a process than on its outcomes. Hevner et al. believe that the act of creating the
system generates the knowledge about systems, which they call design science. This
perspective, which is practice-focused, reminds us that the creation process and its outcomes
are intimately intertwined. Still, this perspective implies that the system designers already
know the outcome when they start, and that some linear process of going to that outcome
generates the knowledge about the system. Where Walls et al. focus on systems design
theory, and Hevner et al. focus on systems design application, Aier and Fischer (2011)
combine both perspectives in a review of the progress of system design theories and highlight
the unintended side effects of design as an additional component to take into account in
system design theory and design science. By acknowledging positive and negative side
26
effects of system design, they include unpredictability in their definition of the concept. The
language of desired and undesired still implies that designers already know what outcome
they want for their process, so this way of defining system design is not helpful if we do not
In another recent review of design science in information systems, McKay et al. (2012)
argue that the definition as used in information systems was too narrowly focused and should
Marshall, & Hirschheim, 2012, p. 125). McKay et al.'s contribution is to broaden our
perspective from a focus on the design of information systems to include the broader
organization design. Although it is fair to say that information systems design is complex
enough a discipline in its own right to reward a focused literature, the risk of focused
literature is that it excludes the broader perspective and takes on a life of its own. As I intend
to use the case study of one information system design process to learn more about system
design in a broader sense, following the example of McKay et al., I will introduce some
After emerging in the professions of engineering and architecture, design theories found
their way into the social sciences. By focusing on how the process of system design
influenced the outcomes, Boland and his colleagues shifted our focus from the product of
design to the process of designing, thereby bridging the gap between the behavioral and the
science sides of the design conversation (Boland, 1978; Boland, Sharma, & Afonso, 2008;
Yoo, Boland, & Lyytinen, 2006). More recently, Van Aken, Romme, and colleagues used
27
analogy to instill more pragmatism and empirical rigor into management science (Van Aken,
2005, 2007; Van Aken & Romme, 2009). By crossing disciplines, these scholars contribute
to a more complex view of design as a process that is applied across organizations, including,
but not limited to, the design of information systems. The most striking manifestation of how
design theory and design science found their way into practice can be seen in the current
trend of design thinking (Brown & Wyatt, 2010; Martin, 2009). Through design thinking, the
concept of systems design was adopted by many people outside its traditions of origin and is
now being applied to solve almost any problem8. In a comprehensive and recent review of
design thinking, Johansson Skldberg, Woodilla, and Cetinkaya (2013) review the literature
and conclude that it can be broadly conceived of as designerly thinking and design
designers practice [] and theoretical reflections around how to interpret and characterize
this non-verbal competence of the designers (p. 123), while design thinking is the
discourse where design practice and competence are used beyond the design context [], for
and with people without a scholarly background in design, particularly in management (p.
123). The idea of designerly thinking was introduced by Cross (2001), who argued that the
development of the scholarly discourse in design would benefit from designers taking
responsibility for inductively creating science based on rigorous reflection on their own work
as a discipline. Cross frames the field of design outside of designerly thinking as being
composed of scientific design, design science, and the science of design. According to Cross,
8
"Design thinking" generates 5,710,000 results from a Google search on May 1, 2016.
28
systems, while design science uses scientific knowledge to create a method for the design of
systems, and the science of design focuses on methodologically studying what designers do.
prerequisite of scholars using or advancing the field, while design thinking has turned into a
fad with little or no grounding in the scholarly conversation. Despite that, the authors argue
that its popularity does say something about the importance of design in general, and they
make suggestions for how design thinking could create stronger links to the scholarly
conversation in order to preserve valuable concepts for practice once the trend passes over.
Though I could argue that the dichotomy between scholarship and practice that both Cross
and Johansson Skldberg et al. make is itself artificial, I do see how design thinking as a
trend reflects the positivist and ratio-technical premises of its scholarly predecessors, whereas
the frame of designerly thinking embraces a more complex paradigm where practice and
scholarship interweave.
Johansson Skldberg et al. (2013) identify five key scholarly conceptions of designerly
thinking and attribute those five conceptions to what they consider to be the key authors who
have defined those conceptions. They see Simon's (1996) science of the artificial as a
rational discourse focused on creating a positivist view of design where ontological rigor
fosters a factual understanding of the design context and artifacts as a way to advance the
designs. They see Schn's (1983) work with reflection-in-action as a pragmatist discourse
examining the process of designing where designers reflect upon their reflections in order to
consciously use different ways of seeing the design context to advance their designs from
concepts to practical solutions. They see Buchanan's (1992) work with wicked problems as a
29
postmodern form of looking at design challenges, where design challenges are indeterminate
and require a process of cycling through many different placements as a way to create
enough coherence to move towards a design form. They perceive Lawson (2011) and Cross
advance their designs. Finally, they see Krippendorf (2006) as being focused on the co-
creating and meaning making in the process of designing using a hermeneutic epistemology
as the most important focus for understanding design. The authors argue that Schn,
Buchanan, Lawson, and Cross could be put together as practice-focused discourses, even as
they each have a different take on what practice means, while Simon and Krippendorf are in
contrast to both this focus on practice and in contrast to each other's focus (respectively) on
the systematic rational and the hermeneutic nature of designing. They suggest more
positioning this research study in the field. It is interesting to see how their definition of
designerly thinking differs from Cross's (2001) original use of the concept. Cross meant to
contrast the process of designerly ways of knowing with the techno-rational paradigm as
argued for by Simon (1996), while Johansson Skldberg et al. (2013) contrast the
I consider all five discourses described by Johansson Skldberg et al. to be relevant and
important as part of an understanding of the context for this study. I would argue, though,
that increasingly, serious scholars are focusing attention to design thinking. For example,
Kimbell (2011, 2012), Thompson, Steier, and Ostrenko (2014), and Jornet and Steier (2015)
30
are but a few examples of scholars doing serious research into the application of design
traditional context. If we are all designers, as I would like to think, we can study the
Of all the scholars reviewed in this section, Schn addressed the role of metaphor in
design most prominently (1983, 1993, 2011). Schn also argued that we needed to leave the
practice. Schn came closest to addressing a gap in the design literature, which hides behind
the word thinking, the embodied, unconscious, and metaphorical nature of experience that
Metaphor
In the design conversation between me and Indranil, as displayed above, we used several
metaphors that helped us make sense of what we were talking about. Some of these
metaphors were consciously chosen to make sense of a complex subject, while others flowed
into the conversation nonconsciously. Some of these metaphors were deliberately chosen to
achieve a certain effect, while others were non-deliberately used as vehicles for reflection on
the subject under discussion. In this literature review, I will discuss two different ways in
which scholars look at metaphors to make sense of what goes on in this design conversation:
Conceptual Metaphor
Building on earlier work by Richards (1936) and Black (1955), Lakoff and Johnson
(1980) opened our eyes to the conceptual nature of metaphors in their theory of
experientialism, which later evolved into the theory of embodied realism (1999), also often
31
referred to as conceptual metaphor theory (Gibbs, Jr., 2011). Conceptual metaphors help us
metaphorically. For example, when we say, "She is a warm person," embodied realism
would explain our use of "warm" in the sentence by saying that we use our experience of
physical warmth to make sense of the more abstract experience of sympathy or affection.
According to embodied realism, this metaphorical relationship between warmth and affection
For example, when a baby is held lovingly by her mother, both the mother and the baby
experience tangible physical warmth because of the closeness of another human body while
bodily warmth and affection, which repeats multiple times a day over an extended period of
time, settles into the body and then appears in language as the metaphorical inference
largely outside of conscious awareness, we are not conscious to the way in which this process
shapes our thinking. Nevertheless, it is easy to see how the repeated experience finds its way
into language: Warm personalities are not actually physically warmer than cold personalities,
but they do remind us of the physical warmth that a loving parent provided us with while we
automatically infer what warm means in such instances of everyday language. A few
hundred of such primary metaphors have been identified, including IMPORTANT IS BIG,
GOOD IS UP, SAD IS DOWN, and KNOWING IS SEEING (Lakoff & Johnson, 1999, p.
50).
9
I acknowledge that, unfortunately, this is not the case for all of us, and that a lack of such normal
circumstances may lead to very different perceptions of the effect of other persons later in life.
32
Through a process called conceptual blending and integration (Fauconnier & Turner,
2000, 2008; Grady, 2005), we combine primary conceptual metaphors to create complex
conceptual metaphors for comprehensive concepts like love, time, mind, morality, and
causation. The diverse nature of human experience over time provides us with a rich source
of metaphors to help us make sense of abstract concepts. For example, we can make sense of
love by using the complex metaphors LOVE IS A JOURNEY (we each went our separate
ways; love in the fast lane), LOVE IS ENERGY (sparks were flying between them), and
LOVE IS AN ORGANISM (we are growing our love). We make sense of abstract concepts
as important as love by mapping experiences from other domains in infinite ways. Without
such complex metaphors, reasoning about love is almost impossible as the literal aspects of
love only provide us with the skeletal scaffolding of two people and feelings between10
Most conceptual metaphors are conventional, which means that they provide long-time
established ways of sense making for abstract concepts. Conventional metaphors are part of
everyday speech, and because they are so common, they usually do not appear to our
awareness as metaphors. But when we deliberately think about them as metaphors, we can
easily derive the source experience that gave rise to them because the meaning of the words
used in the metaphor still carry their direct linguistic meaning in the source domain. For
example, the two main conventional metaphors for argumentation, ARGUMENT IS WAR
and ARGUMENTS ARE BUILDINGS, each carry the image and meaning of their source
domains. For example, when we say, She attacked my claims one by one, thereby
destroying the foundation of my argument, we can easily derive attacking as an act of war
10
Notice how primary metaphor creeps in to help me explain the literal scaffolding of love.
33
and a destroyed foundation as something that will not support a building. These images are
mapped as meaning to the argument that we are making sense of by using these conventional
or linguistic constructs. The expression love in the fast lane, for example, is a novel
category image of the path or way into a highway, we extend our long history of journeying
along paths with the relative recent history of traveling on highways. Conceptual metaphors
therefore have a lifecycle from novel, to conventional, to death. For example, in the word
pedigree, which is derived from the French word for cranes foot, we can no longer see the
source domain of experience as it has lost its direct meaning for most of us11. In the past,
pedigree was used as a conventional metaphor to depict lineage in a family tree with a small
Over the course of the past few decades, many have worked with Lakoff and Johnson's
(1999) theory of embodied realism and applied conceptual metaphor theory to gather
evidence for the workings of conceptual metaphors in general (Casasanto & Jasmin, 2012;
Crawford, 2009; Lizardo, 2012) and in a range of different domains, like intellectual capital
(Andriessen, 2004), social capital (Andriessen & Gubbins, 2006), political discourse (Ferrari,
2007), human enhancement (Peterson, 2009), and banking (Vignone, 2011). In addition,
scholars have been developing research methods and techniques for conceptual metaphor
identification and analysis (Andriessen & Gubbins, 2009; Rohrer & Vignone, 2012; Schmitt,
2005). As a result of all this, most scholars now accept that metaphors are as much a matter
11
Etymologists, who study the origin of words, might still experience an active relationship between a
word like this and its source domain.
34
Generative Metaphor
Where Lakoff and Johnson looked mostly at metaphor's embodiment and nonconscious
aspects, Schn (1983, 1993) examined metaphor's deliberate use and generative capacity in
problem setting and problem solving. He illustrates the working of generative metaphor in
an example where a group of product developers tried to address a problem with a synthetic
paintbrush that they were designing. The synthetic paintbrush applied the paint in an uneven
way that the designers described as gloppy. In order to solve the problem, they had been
trying to make the bristles of the synthetic paintbrush better resemble the bristles of natural
hair used in the traditional paintbrush. They noticed that the natural hairs had a way of
splitting at the end that they could not achieve with the synthetic bristles, and as they thought
that this splitting of the natural hairs was what made the paint stick better, they assumed that
they were now stuck with addressing the gloppy way in which the paint came out of their
synthetic paintbrush. Then, one of the product developers made the observation that they
could change their idea of a paintbrush. He suggested that a paintbrush could also be seen as
a sort of pump. This idea of the paintbrush as a pump was explored further, and it turned the
attention of the product developers away from problems with the end of the bristles to the
spaces between the bristles. If a paintbrush was a pump, the spaces between the bristles
would be its channels. Pressing the pump would then have the paint flowing through the
channels. This change in perspective had them look at the similarities and differences
between the channels in the traditional, natural paintbrush and the synthetic paintbrush they
were designing. They then noticed a dissimilarity between the natural and synthetic bristles,
namely that the synthetic bristles bent under a different angle than the natural bristles, and
that this angle hindered the flow of paint through the channels of their pump. By making
35
synthetic bristles that bent more like natural bristles, the product developers were able to
Schn (1983, 1993) calls the metaphor A PAINTBRUSH IS A PUMP generative because
the researchers chose to develop their seeing the paintbrush as a pump beyond the mere
metaphorical notion of a pump to identify specific entailments of the metaphor and apply
those to the design of the paintbrush. The experimentation that resulted from the conscious
effort to extend the metaphor through playing with the analogy between natural and synthetic
bristles is what constitutes the generative capacity of the metaphor. Schn acknowledges the
presence of other metaphors in the situation, and theoretically, like Lakoff and Johnson, he
conceives of metaphors as conceptual. But with his focus on the conscious process of seeing
one thing as something else and then applying the analogy in detail to that one thing to solve
work.
Cooperrider (1990) tested a generative metaphor to help a group of managers who run a hotel
in a medical organization to use their experience of visiting a very well run hotel in another
state to liberate their creativity in addressing the challenges in their own organization. Where
they were stuck in the problems of their own context before the visit, seeing the other hotel
and discovering the differences in that hotel as a range of possibilities for their own hotel
fundamentally shifted their behavior and helped them to recreate their own organization. In
12
Lakoff and Johnson made one effort to address the creation of novel metaphor in Metaphors We Live
By (1980), where they generate the metaphor LOVE IS A COLLABORATIVE WORK OF ART. After that,
they have not further developed the pragmatic application of metaphor in their academic work.
36
another example, in information systems design, the office desktop and filing cabinet are
generative metaphors that are deeply embedded in personal computing systems. However,
the desktop metaphor is in need of renewal because of the changes in computing that move
us from the office to the world as a location for mobile computing (Kaptelinin & Czerwinski,
found in Morgan (1998), Pearce (2007), and Gergen (2009). I argue that the generative view
on metaphor can be placed in the broader context of reality as social construction (Berger &
Luckman, 1967; Gergen, 2009; McNamee, 2011). As seen from the perspective of social
creative possibilities to make better social worlds. If metaphors are used consciously and
deliberately to foster positive possibilities for action in everyday speech, we increase the
chance for more positive experiences to occur, which in turn may help us to construct more
positive systems.
But using metaphor to generate new realities is not easy. Cornelissen and Kafouros
(2008) provide a review of how scholars have constructed metaphors for the concept of
organization over the decades, and how these constructions, despite being framed in novel
metaphors from a changing society, are still dominated by the primary metaphors of
organization as structures made up of objects. In our own team in Product Foundry, we have
1998, 2012; K. N. Kamoche et al., 2002; Weick, 1998). In workshops, we experienced the
change potential of this metaphor firsthand when customers, inspired by the experience of
live jazz music, generated new and profound ideas to change their organizations. But when
37
our customers returned to their organizations after the workshops, the new, metaphorical
ways of seeing their organizations as jazz bands quickly receded into the background to make
room for their habitual concepts of separated functional departments, sales targets, and
reporting structures. The conventional metaphors that they intended to change through the
workshops quickly took over from the novel metaphors. The freshly generated new language
soon faded into the embodied, cognitively unconscious domain of conventional metaphors
It seems that a key difference between embodied realist and social constructionist views
these conceptual metaphors that seem to sustain our current reality while designers struggle
The metaphors that Indranil and I used in the transcript of our design conversation were
mentioning them, we invoked images that generated a context that we could act into when
thinking about our work and that allows us to focus what we will think about next to fulfill
certain purposes that we find valuable: creating something way out there that is able to
change current problems with ownership. If we want to go to Mars, and we know that our
current systems can only take us to orbit around the earth, we open up a space in need for
solutions beyond the earth orbit. The metaphor opens up a space that we can start to use to
generate solutions. What will get us from orbit to the moon? What base do we require on
the moon to start us for Mars? What properties of Mars relevant to our mission can we
38
already describe using our telescopes from earth? What will the view from the moon be like,
and what news will we learn to inform our designs from there? What vehicles would we
need to get there? The Mars mission metaphor also helps us seize the measure of our task. If
we spent five years creating a system for earth orbit or a moon mission, then the next
Steinbecks The Grapes of Wrath, who chased the Oklahoma farmers off their land after the
Dustbowl and into a miserable journey fueled by false hopes for new lives in Californias
Central Valley (Steinbeck, 1939). It serves to highlight the possibly adverse parts of the
intellectual property system that we still have today, and that is not that different from the
system that was at play in that great work of art. We want our systems to move away from
how Steinbecks landowners used it, and by using the metaphor in this way, we are reminded
that even though we may care for our clients' concerns regarding ownership, we want to be
sure to not go with their desires all the way. Also, invoking Steinbeck reminds us of how he
himself used metaphor in masterful ways to show the ownership problem. In a passage, the
landowners own the land of the farmers through loans extended by the bank. In talking with
the tenants, the bank is generated as a monster that men can't control:
Sure, cried the tenant men, but it's our land. We measured it and broke it up. We were
born on it, and we got killed on it, died on it. Even if it's no good, it's still ours. That's
what makes it ours--being born on it, working on it, dying on it. That makes
ownership, not a paper with numbers on it.
We're sorry. It's not us. It's the monster. The bank isn't like a man.
Yes, but the bank is only made of men.
No, you're wrong there--quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It
happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it.
The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It's the monster. Men made it but
they can't control it. (Steinbeck, 1939, p. 38)
39
By applying some metaphors that would usually be mostly conceptual and nonconscious,
underlying experiences that give rise to these metaphors so that we can construct our system
in ways that help us achieve our purpose. In this dissertation, these two overlapping
understandings of metaphor from different perspectives are the two central theoretical
concepts.
Scholars have recently begun focusing on the role of conceptual metaphors in design.
Kelly (2014) looked at metaphors for resonance, a term used to describe the extent to which
communication. She interviewed designers and used a form of conceptual metaphor analysis
to identify their metaphors for resonance and their role in communication design. This
application of conceptual metaphor to design can be categorized as a study into the work of
designers approached with the frame of conceptual metaphor theory. In another study,
Andriessen (2008) asked two groups to design solutions for a problem in knowledge sharing
where one group used KNOWLEDGE IS WATER and the other group used KNOWLEDGE
IS LOVE as metaphors. He found that the group using the water metaphor came up with
mechanistic solutions like canals, flushing, and tapping to help fresh water flow from source
to destination again. The group that used love as a metaphor for knowledge wanted to match
people's passions with their tasks and provide more time and space to share knowledge, and
even to swap partners to address problems where knowledge was not cherished, where there
was a lack of trust, and where there were attractive, unmarried, but lonely knowledge singles
40
the groups work, participants in Andriessens study who were managers in the organization
preferred the water metaphor, while participants who were employees preferred the love
metaphor. As a result, Andriessen noticed that there may be power differences at play in the
choice and use of metaphor. Casakin (2012) did something similar, and asked students of
compound of 10 habitats in an Israeli city. He went a step further than Andriessen and
systemically examined the student's reflection on their use of metaphors. The students
reported that using metaphors consciously helped them to come to innovative designs based
on personal beliefs and to improve analysis and reflection on design problems (Casakin,
2012, p. 341). In these studies, conceptual metaphor theory was deliberately used to define
metaphor.
A recent example of the use of conceptual metaphor theory in design is Van Dijk's (2013)
exploration into what he calls embodied cognition design. After a comprehensive play
between theory in practice in which he designed and tested two prototypes for collaborative
brainstorming systems, he concludes, amongst others, that we must consciously make efforts
to leave the Cartesian metaphor of translating information into physical objects for retrieval,
storing, and representation. This is difficult, as the conventional conceptual metaphors for
computing, such as the distributed computation and representation metaphor, hinder a leap
into the unknown. Finally, Hoshi (2012) reviews the literature in embodied cognition,
conceptual blending, and human computer interaction and suggests an approach to human
systems (Hoshi, 2012, p. 171). Through these studies, of which there are only a handful to
41
date, a sense emerges that using embodied realism and conceptual metaphor theory as
starting points for the design of systems generates knowledge that can help us further
There are more studies that use generative metaphor theory in system design than there
are studies that use conceptual metaphor theory in system design. Even though these studies
often acknowledge Lakoff and Johnson's (1999) perspective, they do not take it as a starting
point for their concept of designing. Madsen (1988, 1994) examined the design process of
library systems from the perspective of metaphor breakdown, which he defines as using
developing metaphors, designers can set the situation, experiment with different ways of
seeing-as, and then develop the implications of a metaphor in a switch from what he calls
information system where the metaphors used for information move away from the metaphor
physical and objective. By changing the metaphor to resonance, the human subjectivity of
interacting with the information becomes part of the sensemaking about information. This
information. Schroeders elaborate discussion includes both the conceptual and the
generative metaphor perspectives. In an action research project, Oates and Fitzgerald (2007)
asked information system developers to use Morgan's (1998) eight metaphors for
systems development projects. The developers reflected on the effect of doing so and
42
identified five areas in which they found the use of metaphors especially helpful: to increase
drive decisions to take specific actions, such as deciding to do something in a particular way,
to decide on producing specific designs guided by the metaphor, to the development process
by invoking reactions from others involved in that process, and to identify ideas in hindsight
that could be taken into follow-up projects (Oates & Fitzgerald, 2007).
The number of research studies examining the use of conceptual metaphor and generative
metaphor in systems design is growing, even if their number at present is still small. Most
studies reviewed developed their own theoretical framework for metaphor in design, either as
a starting point for practice or as theory emerging from the examination of design practice.
There is not much coherence in the approach, methods, and techniques for using metaphor in
design, and there are only a few studies that combine the generative and the conceptual
The Case for Deliberate, Conscious, and Transparent Metaphor in System Design
Why should system designers be aware of both generative and conceptual metaphors? In
one of the studies that used Lakoff and Johnson's (1980, 1999) take on metaphors, Peterson
(2009) examined the language of engineers who participated in the MIT media lab's
conference, Human 2.0. This conference explored how the convergence of biotechnology,
human abilities. Conceptual metaphors that were prevalent in the engineers' language were
MAN IS A MACHINE, BRAINS 'R US, MIND IS A COMPUTER, and THE BODY IS AN
implants that have to work with a brain, it actually makes sense to generate the brain as a
43
machine to see where we can fit the implant. And then, when we later want to examine the
effects of living with these implants, we might shift to using a metaphor that generates the
human and social aspects of coping with disability. This would work along the premises of
generative metaphor and design if people could choose and use metaphors consciously. The
research building on the premises of embodied realism, however, shows us that despite
efforts at using metaphors consciously, most of the metaphors we use to reason are deeply
embodied, generating thought and action nonconsciously. Some recent research studies show
that the workings of metaphors through the cognitive unconscious, embodied level is so
pervasive that we could assume the hard work of introducing novel and constructive
metaphors at best hindered and at worst impossible because of the embodiment of metaphors
In one study by Larson and Billetera (2013), six different experiments showed that people
who experienced physical imbalance while making a buying decisions made more balanced
decisions than those in a control group who were standing on solid ground while making the
same decisions. It appears that having to actively balance our bodies while making decisions
influences the way in which we make those decisions. In two other experiments by Zhong
and Leonardelli (2008), it was found that thinking about an experience of social exclusion
made people estimate the temperature in a room to be significantly lower than those who did
not think about social exclusion. In a third study, Kille, Forest, and Wood (2013) found that
people who sit on wobbly chairs and at wobbly tables perceive others love relationships as
less stable and would prefer stable psychological traits in potential romantic partners. Morris
et al. (2007) found that students who were asked to make investment decisions based on
agent metaphors, in which the stock market was conceptualized as a living being using
44
subjective metaphors, made riskier investment decisions and drove up the value of their
portfolio more than students who invested based on stock market news with more literal and
objective metaphors.
What these studies show is that metaphorical concepts in language, whether experienced
through language itself or through other modalities, such as the embodied cognition of
balance or temperature, influence our perception and our decision making. As I assume that
researchers will find more such convergence from psychology experiments building on
embodied realism going forward, we must take seriously the notion that our embodied
metaphors have more influence over our experience than we like to think. We know that
many systems embody metaphors based on worldviews and on science from paradigms that
have shifted. These worldviews and paradigms are persisted by their once generative
metaphors. Over time, we tend to forget the stories that helped establish the system in its day
and age, and with the forgetting of the story, the metaphors shift from being mostly conscious
and generative to being mostly nonconscious and conceptual. Being nonconscious, these
metaphors retain influence on our everyday experience, hindering the establishment of novel,
generative metaphors created to overcome some of the problems in our systems. Therefore, a
dead metaphors may be a key to the successful application of deliberate, novel, conscious,
In the worst case, metaphors are chosen deliberately to assert power and then disguised to
hide their effect. Barrett and Sarbin look at the metaphor of the war on terrorism and how it
generates action potentials, which in turn lead to the actual entailment of boots on the
ground that try to fight a phenomenon that, they argue, would be much better coped with
45
through the metaphor of a criminal investigation into terrorism (Barrett & Sarbin, 2007;
Sarbin, 2003). Rohrer and Vignone (2012) uncover the metaphors that bank CEOs used to
defend their role in the recent financial crisis. They find that the systematic metaphor THE
Financial markets were shocked and collapsed, assets became frozen, houses are under water,
and the government provided a TARP (Temporary Asset Relief Program). Their critical
analysis of the metaphorical entailments of the metaphor shows that by framing the crisis as a
natural disaster, men cannot be held responsible for their actions, because a natural disaster is
out of their control. Even though there is no proof that these metaphors are chosen
deliberately to persuade, it is certain that they have systemic consequences that would be
If we want to address some of the structural challenges in our current systems, one way of
new ways of seeing the problems and of generating the solutions in our systems, to become
as conscious as possible of those metaphors, especially the ones hidden in our cognitive
those we work with in creating those systems and those that will use those systems to do the
same.
The word improvise comes from Latin, meaning unforeseen. Joint improvisation can
thus be defined as to work together to make, invent, or arrange what is unforeseen out of
what is conveniently at hand. As the first definition explains, improvising is often used in the
context of art performance where what is made is composed and recited in an improvised
The significance of joint improvisation as a metaphor for systems design lies in its ability
to make practical sense of complexity, arguably one of the most cited challenges facing
systems designers13, and in its growing maturity as a metaphor applied to organizational and
systems design problems by both scholars and practitioners. In addition, its significance for
this particular study lies in the benefit of choosing an explicit metaphor as a guide for the
study when the study itself is about making sense of metaphors in the design process. In our
practice in Product Foundry, jazz improvisation is a guiding metaphor for our approach to
for examination and interaction so we can continually critically assess its reflexive influence
on this study.
Most scholars would likely agree that complexity is a given. In a recent review of
complexity, Tarride (2013) says that, Complexity seems to be present in all systems; we live
in a complex world, we are complexity immersed in complexity (p. 181). In another review,
research that seeks to explain how large numbers of relatively simple entities organize
themselves, without the benefit of any central controller, into a collective whole that creates
13
A search in Fielding's online library on May 1, 2016 yields 26,354 peer-reviewed journal articles
with the both the terms complexity and system design in their full-text.
47
patterns, uses information, and, in some cases, evolves and learns (loc. 239-240). The
complex is often positioned as a realm between the chaotic and the ordered (Kurtz &
Snowden, 2003; Stacey, 1995; Tarride, 2013). The complex can not be understood in terms
of stable relationships between cause and effect or consistent relationships between parts and
wholes. The complex is frequently contrasted with the complicated and the simple, in which
the relations between the parts and the whole are knowable or known, and cause and effect
emergence points to the idea that wholes are more than the sum of their parts. As a process,
it examines how such wholes form from their parts and how these wholes, in turn, influence
the parts from which they evolve. In a review of emergence, Corning (2002) said that [i]f
complexity is currently the buzzword of choice for our newly minted millennium, as many
theorists proclaim, emergence seems to be the explication of the hour for how complexity
has evolved (p. 18). In tracing back the roots of complexity and emergence as scholarly
phenomena, I mostly arrive at the breakthroughs in physics at the end of the 19th and
beginning of the 20th century. In tracing back the roots of emergence, I mostly arrive at the
biological and evolution theories that emerged at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the
20th century.
continuing progress in the development of our knowledge and skills will ultimately uncover
the relationships between all parts and wholes. Complexity, on the other hand, assigns non-
reducible meaning to phenomena as they are inherently complex and emergent. I quote
48
Tarride (2013) at length as he captures the ontological sense of complexity well when he says
that
One challenge with the literature of complexity is that it reflects itself in being complex,
abstract, and, by its very nature, hard to grasp. As we have seen above, metaphors are useful
in helping us make sense of complexity, and improvisation is an often used metaphor for
making sense of complexity (Pina e Cunha & Rego, 2010; Pina e Cunha, Clegg, Rego, &
Neves, 2014; Pina e Cunha & Vieira da Cunha, 2006; Tjrnehj & Mathiassen, 2010).
Complexity theorists Shaw and Stacey displace complexity with improvisation when they
say that
creativity and innovation through the complexity of the act of jazz improvising as an antidote
to the planning paradigm, exemplified by the word organization itself, which "denotes
orderly arrangements for cooperation" (p. 543). Although scholars have been interested in
improvisation in organizations for quite a while (see, for instance, Eisenhardt, 1989, 1997;
Weick, 1993; Weick & Van Orden, 1990), it was not until 1998 that the exact term started
49
appearing in the literature. Frank Barrett remembers a conversation with Weick in which he
asked him if he had ever considered bringing his experience as a jazz pianist to his
Weick, Barrett, and a host of organization scholars and musicians were on stage at the
coincided with two publications by Moorman and Miner (1998a, 1998b), who also looked at
Improvisation (Kamoche et al., 2002), collected the work done so far, identified key
theoretical aspects of organizational improvisation, and set a research agenda for the newly
emerging field.
The authors in organizational improvisation use the process and the characteristics of
(mostly jazz) improvisation as an analogy that allows dilemmas that otherwise invite either-
Barrett & Peplowski, 1998; Kamoche & Pina e Cunha, 2001; Zheng, Venters, & Cornford,
2011), at innovation as both a process of micro-level interaction in the small group and a
macro pattern of innovation level (Faia-Correia & Pina e Cunha, 2007), and at strategy as
both planned and emergent (Pina e Cunha & Vieira da Cunha, 2006; Vieira da Cunha & Pina
allow topics that would otherwise be dealt with as dilemmas to be dealt with as paradoxes
that can be held. Also, by focusing on the messy process of activity in real-time
systems. Finally, as a metaphor rooted in an embodied form of art, it offers the potential to
probe deeper into our human being than the surface phenomena of observed performance.
These characteristics make it especially suited as a metaphor to coherently discuss both the
way to understand the design of systems in the face of complexity has been a central focus
for many authors. Moorman and Miner (1998a) found that improvisation can have a
as an organizational strategy where its benefits and risks are balanced in a coherent way and
the context in which it is effective is well understood in the whole organization. Kamoche
and Pina e Cunha (2001) identify 12 minimal social and technical structures in jazz
for new product development. According to Kamoche and Pina e Cunha, the social structure
of alternating between soloing and supporting in jazz entails the social structure of revolving
leadership, and the technical minimal structure of the song entails the technical minimal
structure of product concepts and prototypes on which to improvise (2001, p. 751). Zheng,
the case of the development of GridPP, a large distributed computing system, and identified
the concept of collective agility as a way of understanding what they call enacted
emergence, which in turn is based on six paradoxes derived from the literature of
structured chaos, collective individuality, and anxious confidence (Zheng et al., 2011, p.
51
308). Where these authors focus on improvisation in the systems design process and its
influence on the outcomes, Hoffman and Weinberg (2011) provide one of the few examples
This brief review of the organizational improvisation literature shows the power of the
particular. But, according to a recent review of the field, "the cumulativeness of research on
improvisation in organizations remains low" (Hadida et al., 2015, p. 437). And, with the
yet that actually examines the conscious implementation or use of that metaphor itself in
Improvisation
improvisation has the potential to be a meta-power tool for designing systems for complexity.
The design space generated by the entailments of improvisation as a metaphor promises ways
to balance many of the paradoxes inherent in the organization of system design. The
conceptual entailments of the metaphor are deeply rooted in a human practice of art that can
be traced back to the tribes of West Africa from which we all emerged (Austerlitz, 2005).
Both as an art and as a practice, improvisation is deeply embodied in our being and our
history. We improvise all the time, and when we allow the metaphorical entailments of
thinking about the process of designing. As my review of the literature shows, there are not
many studies where improvisation was used as a metaphor to generate a system. In the
process of creating this dissertation, I studied a case where improvisation was consciously
used as a metaphor to guide the process of the designing and developing a method and a
system, and where improvisation was also intentionally used as one of several metaphors to
different metaphors that we use to highlight (and obscure) aspects of their experience.
Improvisation as a metaphor for the design of systems that help us better deal with
complexity highlights many of those abstract concepts. At the same time, many other
metaphors exist that can be applied to highlight systems design for complexity from other
perspectives. Therefore, in this study, I will focus both on improvisation as a metaphor for
the design of systems that help us better deal with complexity and on the practice of
improvising with metaphors in the complex process of systems design. I will also focus on
metaphor to be embodied in the system that is designed. The research question, How do our
joint improvisations with metaphors become embodied in the system that we are creating?
Summary
System design as a discipline looks at the concept, the process, and the outcomes of the
work of systems designers. This work ranges from the design of tangible physical systems,
like machines and physical structures, to intangible information systems and organizations.
The discipline has transcended its traditional boundaries to include its application to
53
management science, and in the form of the trend in design thinking to almost every aspect
of life. In a useful overview of the field, the distinction between designerly thinking and
design thinking was proposed as a way to ground a study on designing in the literature. By
choosing Schns work in design as my starting point, I grounded this study in the field of
designerly thinking, and at the same time created a bridge between designerly thinking and
nonconscious and embodied as a result of continuous human experience with self, others, and
entailments of the generative metaphor lead to certain design outcomes. I argued that
nonconscious conceptual metaphors often work against the creative possibilities offered by
persist hidden and forgotten stories and thereby withhold us from creating sorely needed
systemic changes.
Next, I defined joint improvisation as a metaphor to support the design process of systems
that are meant to help users deal with complexity and emergence, and I reviewed the
systems design. I concluded that even though improvisation has been used to make sense of
the systems design process in complex and emergent environments, there is no literature
where organizational improvisation was used as a design metaphor for the systems design
process and the systems design itself. I argued that greater consciousness of otherwise
54
unconscious metaphors increases the generative design space, and that improvisation is the
generative metaphor on which such a practice could be based. In applying the metaphor of
nonconscious metaphors, both the metaphor of improvisation itself, and the process of
This study explores how our joint improvisations with metaphors become embodied in the
systems that we are creating, and this chapter outlines how I studied one case where
improvisation was used as a metaphor to consciously guide and shape the development of a
new design method and a new IT system. In this case, the designers of the new method and
the new system were consciously aware of the role of metaphors in systems design during the
research process. The case is the creation of Embodied Making and Business Elements, a
method and a system to support the design and development of systems that are better able to
address complexity than currently available business systems. The study covers the period
between 2011 and 2014 in which the idea for Embodied Making lead to its realization as a
the method. Embodied Making was created by Indranil Bhattacharya, Andr Kampert, and
myself, in close cooperation between our three firms while we worked on consulting projects
with clients in the same period. The creation of Embodied Making was also a conscious
effort to integrate the knowledge that I developed in my PhD program with Fielding
Graduate University.
Later, they add that action research is not so much a methodology as an orientation to
inquiry (Reason & Bradbury, 2008, p. 1). Greenwood and Levin point out that there are as
many definitions of action research as there are movements applying it. Nevertheless, they
say that all action research seems to jointly express three patterns: First, action research is
research with people, not research on people. This means that the knowledge and skills that
the researchers bring to a study is equally valuable to the practical knowledge that other
research participants bring to the study. Second, action research must produce knowledge
that is both useful to the people participating in the study in their everyday life, and useful to
the research discipline itself. Third, action research does not prescribe specific methods and
techniques but requires researchers to select and use the best method, or mix of methods, to
Defined in this way, action research fits well with the personal and organizational goals
that drove this study. As practitioners, Indranil, Andr, and I desired to fundamentally
redesign information systems in order to contribute to a better social world. For this we felt
we needed to develop our practice starting from the leading edge of research. As a result of
the process of making leading edge knowledge available in and through our system, we want
to advance our (and others) general knowledge by sharing what we have learned in the
process. Furthermore, the gaps addressed in the literatures reviewed mostly showed the need
design and the application of the metaphor of organizational improvisation to the design of
systems. As a result, the study is primarily focused on how these concepts emerge in practice
and what practices can be developed to more consciously apply the research-theoretical
as it allowed the systems design team to shift perspective, becoming a research team
reflecting on the design of their system to improve its practical application and set it in the
context, and allowing it to benefit from, leading edge knowledge. It also allowed me, as a
member of the design team, to be the lead researcher driving the study as part of my PhD
program and to be an entrepreneur helping to balance the research teams needs with the
In the action research discourse, many methods were developed that made action research
developed appreciative inquiry as a way to turn our focus from problems to positive
potential, and Schein (2001) proposed clinical inquiry as a way to emphasize the research
participants self-capability for data gathering in research settings. These are only two
illustrations of dozens of different ways in which action research has been applied.14 For this
study, I chose to work with action inquiry, an action research method developed by Bill
Torbert and a community of colleagues over the course of two decades (Chandler & Torbert,
2003; Fisher, Rooke, & Torbert, 2003; Torbert, 2001; Torbert & Taylor, 2008). Action
inquiry is a method that interweaves first, second, and third-person perspectives on the
outside events, our own sensed performance, action logics, and intentional attention
Action inquiry fits well with this studys research question because its structure provides
three conscious perspectives for data gathering and analysis that correlate with the research
14
For an extensive overview of action research and action research methods, see Reason and Bradbury
(2001, 2008).
58
questions shifts in perspective from second person (our joint improvisations; we are
creating) to third person (metaphors; the system), and the process by which the one becomes
the other (becoming embodied). Action inquiry also helped with maintaining a conscious
reflexive awareness of my two roles while participating in the research. In addition, action
inquiry provides ways to understand how our perspectives co-arise in the complexity of
every lived moment. Because of this, action inquiry also correlated well with the
improvisation metaphor that drove this study because, in improvisation, the minimal
structures of a song also co-arise in the moment with the unique improvisations of the
musicians playing those structures. Furthermore, action inquiry is inspired by integral theory
(Esbjrn-Hargens, 2006; Wilber, 2000, 2006) in how it accounts for the big three
perspectives of beauty, goodness, and truth through its research perspectives on first-person
objectivity. Through this, action inquiry embodies action researchs prerequisite to mix and
match methods that fit the research context. Action inquiry also fits with the integral
perspectives also resonate with embodied realisms starting point that reason is a process that
arises from continuity between self (first person), other (second person), and environment
(third person).
experience and their related perspectives. It illustrates where each starts and shows how they
ways in which we can choose to shift our attention from one perspective to the other, and
59
how we can weave perspective after perspective into a holistic understanding of the whole
(ABCD, and the space around and in between created by the dashes).
Figure 1. Action inquiry's meshing territories of experience and how its three perspectives
play out in each territory.
This research study focuses on the design process and outcomes of the design method
Embodied Making and the IT system Business Elements between August 2011 and July
2014. Embodied Making and Business Elements were developed by Indranil Bhattacharya,
60
Andr Kampert, and myself. In August 2011, I was both a partner and an investor in Coena,
a software startup founded by Indranil in which we created and sold a supply chain
collaboration IT system. The idea for this research project emerged after we implemented
directly from their greenhouses. We had asked Andr to help us with the technical
implementation of the project, and together we evaluated the results of the project in the
summer of 2011. One decision that came out of our evaluation was to document our way of
working as a new method for the design and development of IT systems to further improve
the quality of our products and of the way of working in our organization. We were
interested in using this method to develop a new system for the support of processes in
organizations that would do justice to the complexity and messiness of real-life processes.
Initially, Indranil and I met on Friday afternoons with an open agenda to share stories
about our experiences with the design and realization of organizational and information
systems in large and complex environments. After a few of these sessions, the first outlines
of a method emerged. Soon, we asked Andr to join our Friday afternoon sessions and
Embodied Making was developed further. We started applying Embodied Making in our
consulting assignments and in designing the IT systems for our own ventures. Indranil
applied embodied making in the development of a new enterprise architecture for one of the
development of the IT systems of an internet authority in the Netherlands that supports the
functioning of the internet in Europe the Middle East and Africa, and I applied the method in
organizational and systems designs ranging from software startups to enterprises and non-
profits in education and healthcare, and in a global market leader in enterprise social
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tested the method to see its potential to generate systems that embody the complexity of the
challenges they were supposed to meet, like a redesign of the contact list, CarMindz, a
secondhand car marketplace in India, and the design of a real-time telco. During all this, we
To document the method and to support its application in design projects for our client
and ventures, we used collaboration software from Google, but we soon realized that the
large amount of data we generated in our method was not well suited for linear display. In
the spring of 2013, we decided it was time to develop an IT system that would support
Embodied Making in a more structured and fitting manner that would allow us to extend the
premises of the method to business systems. This marked the start of the development of
Business Elements.
By July 2014, Embodied Making was a documented method15 and Business Elements
could be used as an IT system to support working with the method16. Over the course of the
period between August 2011 and July 2014, we had recorded most of our Friday design
sessions. We had all design documentation and outcomes that we created as part of the
process available. This made the development process of Embodied Making and Business
Elements a rich data source for this case study because we could examine our joint
improvisations with metaphors while designing the system, and we could examine the ways
15
At the time of editing, Embodied Making as it was further developed by Product Foundry since 2014
is available at http://www.embodiedmaking.org/
16
At the time of editing, Business Elements as it was further developed by Product Foundry since 2014
is available at http://www.embodiedmaking.com/
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in which we as designers made sense of how some of those metaphors became embodied in
Figure 2 below visually displays the timeline of the development of Embodied Making
and Business Elements. It shows the occurrence and the duration of key episodes on three
levels of our design and development process. On the bottom, it names key episodes in our
design conversations. In the middle, it names key outcomes of the design conversations in
the systems development process such as design artifacts, usable Embodied Making
documentation and Business Elements prototypes, bta versions, and the first full working
version of the Business Elements IT system. On the top, it displays key episodes of
reflection on both the design conversations and the systems development outcomes.
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Figure 2. Timeline of key episodes in the Embodied Making and Business Elements design
and research process.
The numbered red circles serve as a guide to the description of the process below and
1. The first design sessions, resulting in the name Embodied Making, represented in
3. The adoption of Christopher Alexander's idea of forces into the river metaphor
5. The start of the design of a system to support Embodied Making and the choice of
7. The use of Embodied Making as the design for a game in a workshop with
farmers and the visual redesign of Business Elements; first bta system.
The eight episodes leading to the release of the first version of the system will be
discussed now. Episodes 9 and 10 are further discussed in the next section, Research Design.
In our first design sessions, we shared stories about our experience with systems and
expressed our desire to create a system that would closely support the immediate human
distinguished between the process of realizing outcomes and living with the outcomes as a
process. Indranil documented the results of these first sessions in the diagram displayed in
Figure 3 below.
Figure 3. First visual representation of Embodied Making. In this diagram, the key forms to
understanding the case study are the circles and the squares; the text of the diagram is not
important to the case study as presented here.
and Cronen, and the global community of scholars working on the communication theory,
Pearce & Cronen, 1980). In these early sessions, we talked about a river as a metaphor for
(Heraclitus, 2003) and literature (Hesse, 2008). However, we were not so happy with the
dominance of the natural and linear entailments of that we perceived in the river as a
metaphor. We liked the notion of a process moving from A to B, like a river that flows from
the mountains to the sea, and we also saw value in a metaphor from nature, but we were
struggling to apply the idea of a river to systems in the same way that Hesse could make a
river work for Siddhartha. If we left human nature out of the river, it would be a more
natural replacement for the conveyor belt metaphors already embodied in the existing process
management systems we were meaning to redesign. We missed the human element in the
We achieved a breakthrough on September 26, 2011 when we were on the Mont Blanc for
a team-building event with our software development team from Romania. The visual
designer on that team, who had studied philosophy, told us that Heraclitus may have meant
that the man stepping into the river not only changes the flow of the river, but that the flow of
the river also changes the man. Both change in their mutual interaction, the man by now
having the experience of having stepped into the river, and the river as it has flown with the
man. Where before Indranil and I had made sense of the river only from the mans
perspective, we could now see the man from the rivers perspective as well. This helped us
realize that the river metaphor, taken this way, could cohere the complex interaction between
humans and systems that we were looking for. We continued playing with the river as a
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metaphor for the design of Embodied Making in our sessions, now conceiving of it as A
3. Alexander's Forces
suggested that we would use the work of Christopher Alexander (Alexander, 1964, 1979;
Alexander et al., 1977) as an inspiration for Embodied Making, but we were struggling with
applying his ideas in a practical way. Then Indranil shared a video he found about how 37
Figure 4. 37 Signals's Ryan Singer presents how he uses Alexander in his design method.
17
See http://vimeo.com/10875362
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Their practical way of working with Alexander evolved around his ideas of context, form,
and forces. Alexander talks about identifying the forces that shape a design context and how
those forces should be balanced in the form of the design. In Notes on the Synthesis of Form,
Alexander (1964) resolves more than 140 forces into patterns for the design of an Indian
village. We were struggling with how to move from Alexander's long, linear lists of forces to
a synthesis in form. The way 37 Signals's Ryan Singer represented the forces in the context
around a design challenge was a great way to visualize forces, but the relative small numbers
in his example did not do justice to the larger numbers Alexander used and that we
anticipated using. Also, the way 37 Signals used the forces correlated strongly with the
strengthening the coherence between the theories we were trying to bring into Embodied
Making (Cronen, Pearce, & Snavely, 1979). But the idea of 37 Signals, combined with the
river metaphor, provided us with the idea to organize the forces as streams in the river. As a
At this point, we had started a project that we used to test Embodied Making in practice.
The idea was that we would redesign the contact list in a way that fitted the ideas of
management, a selection of which is displayed in Figure 5 below. We used these to test out
Figure 5. Selected forces, F(x), from the design context of a contact management system.
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On December 1, 2011, we each worked on making a river of forces from the selected
forces from the context of contact management in Figure 5 above. The next day, we
compared the outcomes of this exercise, which are displayed in Figure 6 and Figure 7 below.
After this session, we started applying Embodied Making in our own product
development, our own ventures, and in our paid consulting work for clients. We applied
Embodied Making with startups and enterprises in oil exploration, education, healthcare,
software, and agriculture. We were happy to see early adoption of our ideas with a large
client in telecommunications who provided us with generous space for the application and
development of our emerging method. Many of the ideas in Embodied Making were
developed in concert with that first adopter, some of which were published (Bhattacharya &
Hartges, 2012) and presented (Van Middendorp, 2012). We kept getting together every
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Friday to further develop Embodied Making. The method at that point consisted of several
steps: 1. Gathering and documenting stories and anecdotes from the design context; 2.
Surfacing the forces from the stories and the design context; 3. Generating a metaphor to give
coherence to the solution space; and 4. Shaping solutions and solution patterns that balance
Making during this period; therefore, we used easily available collaboration systems like
Google Sites to share the Embodied Making documentation and the information generated by
the application of the method, and we used designer tools like Microsoft Visio and Adobe
InDesign to visualize stories, forces, metaphors, and solutions. A few examples of Embodied
Making artifacts that were created in this "manual" period are displayed below.
Figure 8 shows a page from a Google Site from a venture to develop a secondhand car
marketplace in India with the working name AutoVenture. On the page, we see a
navigation column to the left that shows the different sections of the site. The content on the
page, on the right, shows several forces interactions with excerpts from stories from which
those forces were derived around force number 1: "The next car is the dream car. These
force interactions provide an analysis of a part of the river of forces for this car marketplace.
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Figure 8. Some force interactions in the river of forces of an online car marketplace in India.
Figure 9 below shows the result of putting the forces for contact management on a poster
that represents a hotel lobby. For the project in which we redesigned the contact
We each created an instance of that metaphor that resonated with our own experience. In my
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case, I chose the Fielding community gathered in the lobby of the Fess Parker Double Tree
resort in Santa Barbara, CA. The yellow sticky notes represent hotel lobby structures, such
as the entrance, the reception desk, the concierge, the caf, the lounge area, the gift shop, the
elevators, and the staircase. The green sticky notes are the forces from the contact
management context analysis applied to the generative space of the hotel lobby metaphor.
For example, as an instance of force 11 from the analysis, which reads, "Preference to be
contacted in a specific manner," my design says, "with Fielding folks, I prefer to use my .edu
address."
Figure 9. Force interactions for contact management framed in a metaphorical hotel lobby.
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The manual period provided us with a lot of experience in applying Embodied Making.
We used that experience to refine the method, but the tools we used to support Embodied
Making were increasingly in our way. In some projects, we identified up to 500 forces, and
working with linear lists and manual comparisons became tiresome. We also felt that the
ways in which we were using Embodied Making were now stable enough to warrant its own
IT system. On June 7, 2013, Indranil, Andr, and I started thinking about a system to support
Embodied Making. Andr suggested the form of a hexagon as a way to capture and display
stories, forces, and solutions. Together, these hexagons could form an infinite canvas to
support the application of Embodied Making. We each went home to think about how such
forms could support the method. On June 14, 2013, we got together again to compare our
notes. The figures below show the diagrams that Indranil, Andr, and I came up with for that
session. We thought that Andrs hexagon diagrams, as shown in Figure 13, were best fit for
capturing the river of forces metaphor, and we chose to further develop his idea.
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Figure 10. Sergej's hexagon ideas and a short analysis of forces for Embodied Making itself.
Figure 11. Indranil's application of hexagons to organize solutions for the Dutch agriculture
project.
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Figure 13. Andrs hexagon design that we selected for the Embodied Making IT system.
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We tasked our newly formed software development team in India with the creation of a
prototype system, and in October 2013 the whole company got together in Valencia, Spain,
for a few days of teambuilding. In one of our workshops, Andr and the Indian team
presented the first prototype of the Embodied Making system which, at that time, looked like
Figure 14 below. The prototype was based on an infinite canvas on which you could put and
organize stories forces and solutions as hexagons. The system addressed a number of the
issues we had with the manual Embodied Making: It allowed us to organize Embodied
Making artifacts visually, it had no limits as to the amount of information we could put in one
In August, we started developing the process support IT system that we originally wanted
to make, and for which we had first developed Embodied Making as a method. Indranil had
come up with the idea of Business Elements as a metaphor for a business system that would
allow each instance of information to have a unique form based on its life as an instance in
the system. The analogy with the periodic table of the elements, which allow any existing
object to be a unique instance, but which is always based on a finite set of molecules,
organization to have a unique form represented in the data of the supporting IT system.
There is more to this, but for the purpose of this dissertation, it serves to say that as one
design artifact for the creation of Business Elements, Indranil suggested a particle language
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based on the ontology of John Sowa, a knowledge engineer (2000). These particles are
After some experimentation with this particle language, we decided to start developing the
first business elements product and person, and we decided that the IT system supporting
Embodied Making would be the same IT system supporting Business Elements. The process
of designing products would then be on the same canvas as the information about actual
products, thereby creating an integration between the method and the IT system.
There were quite a few technical and usability issues with the prototype, so we decided
we would not use this version of the system with clients. Instead, we asked our newly hired
designer in the Amsterdam team to make a new design for the IT system that would serve as
the basis for the actual product. At the same time, we were applying Embodied Making as a
method to create a game for workers in the Dutch greenhouse sector. This game would be
used to let teams in greenhouses create solutions for operational problems themselves under
the guidance of a gamehost (their manager). Our new designer wanted to understand
different ways in which we were using Embodied Making, so he went with me to the
workshops with the farmers. In the workshops, I used Embodied Making as a paper
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prototype that can be played on the table. Figure 16 is a picture that we took at one of the
workshops. It shows one story (S025) with several forces [F(x)], and three solutions [C(x)]
on the table.
Around the same time, our designer came up with the redesign of the IT system
supporting Embodied Making and Business Elements. Figure 17 below shows the
18
A first working version of a system is often called a bta to indicate that it can be used, but that it
will still be rough around the edges.
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Figure 17. Embodied Making bta version after redesign (Copyright Product Foundry).
Screenshot taken from embodied making on December 5, 2013. Reprinted with permission.
Under the guidance of Andr, the bta was re-engineered from the bottom up to arrive at
the first fully working version of Business Elements in the spring of 2014. This version
supported working with Embodied Making and the first business elements of Product and
Person. Figure 18 below shows a screenshot from the working IT system displaying data
from the Embodied Making workshop with the farmers as discussed above.
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Figure 18. Business Elements system with Embodied Making results of the farmer's river of
forces (Copyright Product Foundry). Screenshot taken from Business Elements on July 5,
2014. Reprinted with permission.
Research Design
business partners at the same time. The research team and the system design team were the
same three people acting in different roles. I think it is fair to say that Indranil and Andr
identified more with their roles as business partners and members of a system design team
than with their roles as members of a research team. For them, more so than for me, the
research perspective on the design process was a means to the end of creating the design
For all three of us, it was paramount that leading edge knowledge should inform the
design of the method and the system, but for me the whole process was also a means to
creating my PhD dissertation. The knowledge coming to the system through the PhD
program was more than welcome, but many of the formal requirements for the creation of a
PhD dissertation were not as valuable to them as they were to me. Nevertheless, because
both Indranil and Andr knew the PhD program was also important to me personally, they
gracefully committed to co-creating the dissertation and to applying the outcomes in the
creation of Embodied Making. To manage this complex balancing act between the
requirements of practice and the requirements of research work, I took the role of lead
researcher in the research team. In that role, I performed as a facilitator for catalyzing the
knowledge from the PhD program into Embodied Making. During this process, we
frequently reflected on how the research and the practice were informing and helping each
After July 2014, our relationships changed because I decided to leave as a partner in
Product Foundry, the organization in which we developed Embodied Making and Business
Elements together from September 2013 to July 2014. The research team was dissolved and
all further analysis of the data, discussion of findings, literature review, and concluding were
Over the course of the creation of this dissertation, I met with my committee seven times.
In these meetings, different versions of the emerging dissertation were discussed and the
formal deliverables were reviewed. Often, in these meetings, dilemmas emerging from the
tension between research and practice were discussed and ideas were conceived for how to
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deal with them. I experienced my committee as an extended research team that influenced
the form that this study took in significant ways. Rather than leaving this role in the
the committee's feedback has significantly influenced the contents or form of the dissertation.
Research Process
The data gathering and analysis for this study were performed in the following way:
1. Lead researcher gathered and organized 2.5 years of recorded design session,
design documentation, design artifacts, and a finished system during the design
Making design meetings and breakthrough moments19 in those meetings for the
those sessions, highlighted those moments that fit the research teams
4. Research team chose one specific breakthrough moment as a starting point for
analysis.
5. Lead researcher transcribed and analyzed the chosen breakthrough moment for its
19
While performing this procedure, my good friend and fellow scholar, Romi Boucher, was working
on her dissertation on breakthrough moments in design (Boucher, 2014). Romi's work has influenced me
profoundly but was not finished before we made these steps, so I did not have the benefit of using her work to
inform me formally.
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6. Lead researcher gathered and organized related design artifacts and systems
components generated from the breakthrough moment as data for further analysis.
7. Research team reflected on the analysis, the design artifacts, and the system
9. Lead researcher performed an initial pilot study analysis to test and refine the
method.
10. Research team, dissertation committee reflected on the results of the pilot study
11. Lead researcher used NVivo20, a software application that supports academic
12. Lead researcher used NVivo to identify and code the research teams own findings
13. Lead researcher used NVivo to analyze, identify, and code ways to further discuss
the research teams findings and discussions in the light of the literatures reviewed
in this dissertation.
14. Lead researcher used NVivo to write up and organize his own findings.
15. Lead researcher used NVivo to identify relevant emerging options for further
discussion.
20
NVivo is software that supports qualitative and mixed methods research. It is designed to help
researchers organize, analyze and find insights in unstructured, or qualitative data like interviews,
open-ended survey responses, articles, social media and web content: http://www.qsrinternational.com/
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16. Lead researcher chose options for discussion that related best to answering the
research question.
18. Dissertation committee provided suggestions for ways to further discuss findings,
20. Lead researcher analyzed and modelled the findings from the discussion and the
additional literature.
21. Lead researcher tested the emerging model with relevant episodes from the data
23. Lead researcher wrote conclusions and reorganized the dissertation structure to
The conceptual metaphor that gives coherence to the previous section is what Lakoff and
Johnson (1999) call the location event-structure metaphor. This conceptual metaphor frames
1999, p. 179)
The metaphor emerges in the "way in which" the analysis was performed and in the "23
steps" taken on that way to reach the final conclusion. The strength of the journey metaphor
is that it helps us keep track of long-term activities and structure them in a linear fashion, at
least in retrospect. A weakness of the journey metaphor is that it hides much of the
complexity in the lived experience of those making each step in the journey. When looking
back, it is easy to see where locations and changes from one location to another were made in
the journey. But while moving through a location on the journey at the time, the experience
of change was more gradual and complex. So, even though the 23 steps above help us make
sense of the structure inherent in the research process retrospectively, additional metaphors
will help us integrate more of the complexity of the lived experience of this research.
Lewin (1948) used a cyclical metaphor when he suggested that activities in action
research follow a circle of planning, action and fact-finding about the result of the action,
which in turn may "serve [...] as a basis for modifying the over-all plan" (p. 146). In this
study, a circular process was present throughout the whole process. In retrospect, six cycles
outlined above. Adding these cycles is helpful in understanding the different locations that
d. The designing of a model that integrates the discussion and the findings (step 20);
e. A test of the model using some data from the case study (step 21);
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These six cycles emerge in retrospect from a reflection on the research process. Lewin's
cyclical metaphor helps us understand that each research activity changes our knowledge,
and with this change in knowledge, we may want to change the course of our journey. It also
helps us to see the value of journeying as inherent in the process as well as in the outcomes
because cycles never really reach a conclusion; they can always be continued. But when we
lay out each cycle linearly, we still make journeys with steps. The cyclical metaphor cannot
uncover the complexity of the lived experience of the research process to an extent that helps
understand and appreciate the layers of reflexivity that we found and made in this study. In
Heraclitus says,
The river
where you set
your foot just now
is gone--
those waters
giving way to this,
now this. (Heraclitus, 2003, p. 320)
highlighting the complexity of purposeful activity. Stepping into a river adds complexity
over stepping because water always flows. Every time you step in that place again (as in a
cycle), you know the water has changed even if the pattern of the river may still seem the
21
See page 69 above, which describes the Heraclitus breakthrough moment in the design of embodied
making.
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same. The second fragment adds the complexity of the relationship between stepper and
stepped-in. The experience of stepping changes the man as well as the river. Furthermore,
final contribution of Heraclitus formulations is that they are still coherent with the conceptual
location event-structure metaphor. From here onwards, I will therefore use the word
stepping instead of the word step to invoke stepping into the river as a generative
metaphor to understand the steppings in each moment, each cycle, and the whole journey of
In personal communication, Steier (2015) offered the Old-Norse word kenning to help
make sense of condensed knowledge in visual metaphors. In an earlier article, Steier (1992)
defined kennings as deeply condensed metaphors [...] that imbue the sagas [of Norse
mythology] with much of their flavor and character. (Steier, 1992, p. 3) Wikipedia says
that kennings are "a type of circumlocution, in the form of a compound that employs
such, kennings are useful when naming a phenomenon that would lose some of its
Like above, where the complexity of the process of this study benefits by changing step
to stepping, here, the complexity of what comes out of this study will benefit by changing
way that cannot be named in one word. Kenning allows being at a place in a stepping that
marks a natural boundary between one stepping and the next, whether at the end of a step, a
cycle, or in the midst of being in the river. A kenning can occur at any time to signify the
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integration of knowing that comes from passing through a complex learning. But instead of a
conclusion, and an end, a kenning points out the longer duration of the process of becoming-
reflexive relationship between knowing something new and continuing wondering about
what that new means. Together, stepping-kenning, as a new kenning, affords ways to make
purposeful activity: taking a step, coming full circle, and being/becoming in real-time
reflexive complexity. Therefore, I will use the terms stepping and kenning where relevant to
See-Through Reflexivity
A third point worth mentioning before moving into the next chapters is that of see-through
Reflexivity, or a turning back onto a self, is a way in which circularity and self-
reference appear in inquiry, as we contextually recognize the various mutual
relationships in which our knowing activities are embedded. These include, for
example, a relationship between language and experience that allows to see
individual experience as socially constructed, rooted in languaging activities whose
possibilities for becoming our experience provides. (Steier, 1991, p. 162)
In this research, reflexivity played a large role, both in the desire of the researchers to
learn about metaphor while applying it and in the required understanding of metaphor while
applying it, as well as in the developed knowledge about metaphor after applying it, which in
turn informs how the research team understands and works with metaphor. This reflexivity
leads to instances in the data and in the analysis where metaphor, at times, seems subject
matter, theory, and method at the same time. This may be what we get when we make up a
research team like this one, but it is also good to say that this may not be usual. It affords, I
hope, the generation of new knowledge because of this reflexivity, but it can also be
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confusing for the reader when the data or the analysis displays this reflexive switching
between different meanings and orientations of the same concept in a single paragraph of
transcript. One way of thinking about this that may be helpful is to see through this
reflexivity, as if when a layer of metaphor is reflected that obscures the clarity for the reader
to see through the reflective layer as if it is on a window that was well polished, and therefore
reflects the subject, while a shift of focus will help us see through the mirroring to what is
beyond. If we embrace this confusion and try to see these moments as see-through
reflexivity, I hope we can move on and trust that integration and reflection to kennings that
Steppings 1 to 10 of the research activities performed in this study were planned and
tested in a pilot study in 2013 and early 2014. These steppings worked well in achieving a
first set of answers to the research question. What follows is a summary of the pilot study
process with a focus on the lessons learned from that process (Stepping 10) and the way in
which those findings changed steppings 1 to 10 and informed the next research cycle
The data required for the first research steppings consisted of the recorded design sessions
of the creation of Embodied Making and Business Elements between August 2011 and June
2013. I identified all the recordings in the Livescribe Desktop application that supports the
Livescribe Pulse recording device that I used to record our design sessions. All design
meetings were marked with their date, the participants, and a title that roughly described the
key themes discussed in that session. As the research team was still working on the further
development of the resulting method and system, as well as using the method and system on
an almost daily basis, I assumed that we would have a fresh enough memory of their
On November 7, 2013, the research team consisting of Andr Kampert, development lead,
Indranil Bhattacharya, system designer, and Sergej van Middendorp, research lead, reflected
on the Embodied Making method and Business Elements IT system around the following
questions:
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What metaphors do we see in the method and the system, in the design artifacts, and in
Which of those metaphors did we consciously try to embody in the method and the
system?
What design sessions do we remember where we had breakthrough moments that further
clarified how we would use metaphors that we consciously embodied in the method and
the system?
I recorded that session and made a rough transcript. Below are several turns from that
transcript that serve to illustrate how we identified the circle, the square, and the hexagon
1. Sergej (S): What metaphors did we put in consciously? What metaphors do we see
that we put in unconsciously? What sessions do we remember where we had
breakthroughs?
2. Indranil (I): Circle and square. Hexagon is sort of a hybrid between circle and square
3. S: Did we make a conscious choice for this metaphor?
4. Andr (A): No more practical.
5. I: Andre pointed out that the mathematical nature of the hexagon was practical.
6. S: What was the first moment we came up with the circle and the square?
7. I: I remember the call with the [client name] guys. It was the first time we presented
it. We came up with it the week before I think.
8. A: I recall that you [points at Sergej] came up with it. In a Friday session where we all
three, you came up with it. We were discussing how we are going to make visible
what we mean by embodied making. I recall that you drew the circle and the square
with the overlap right?
9. S: I remember we were at [client name] and we presented it to an external audience.
The first time I remember was when Indranil made a first very rough sketch, over
dinner you were drawing some first forms. It emerged after a brainstorm session. The
first time I saw them materialized was in a Visio22 file. There were many circles and
squares on that sheet.
10. I: Oh yes, I had forgotten about that. Now that you mention it.
11. S: Summarizing: the first moment was a session in Wijk bij Duurstede, at some point
there was a Visio file, and then, a first moment was when we had the [client name]
22
Visio is a software application that supports the creation of diagrams that we used at that time.
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guys on the call and I drew a circle and a square on paper. Andr, you mentioned the
two overlapping.
LOBBY.
In this reflection session, we did not apply a formal metaphor identification method like
those developed by Steen et al. (2010) and Rohrer and Vignone (2012), but we relied on our
individual conceptions of metaphor and our shared meaning about metaphor as developed in
the design of embodied making itself, which was informed by the literature as reviewed in
Chapter 2 above. We most extensively discussed the circle, the square, and the river of
forces as metaphors as they struck us as being most present in the method and the system. In
the reflection session, we also identified the design sessions and named breakthrough
moments in those sessions in which these metaphors first emerged or were developed further.
As a result of this session, I could now find the relevant session recordings and look for the
After I had made a rough transcript of the reflection session, I found the three recordings
of the design sessions that we identified in our reflection. I made indexical notes of these
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recordings while listening to them. In listening, I punctuated moments with more or less
natural beginnings and endings, noting down their start and end times. For each moment, I
listened for occurrences of the metaphors identified in the reflection session. All the while, I
kept rough notes of what we were saying so it would be easy to validate the applicability of
the selected episodes with Indranil and Andr. The result of this step was a mindmap with
indexical notes where all moments that had relevant improvisations with the metaphors
identified were marked in red. In doing this, it became clear that the river of forces metaphor
had the clearest presence in our improvisations, providing 10 episodes alone in the first two
meetings, and it being the central theme of the entire final meeting with the most exciting
improvisations related to our current system starting at minute 33 of that recording. Below is
a short excerpt of those notes at minute 33 that serves as an illustration of the level of
analysis I was making from the recordings at the time. These were rough so that I could use
them in my next step to choose together with Indranil and Andr what to transcribe in more
detail. See also Figure 6 and Figure 7 above, which are two of the design artifacts referenced
in these notes.
33:00:
Once I had created the indexes and marked the relevant episodes, I suggested to Andr
and Indranil that, for the pilot study, we would choose the river of forces metaphor for further
reflection. After briefly taking them through the indexical notes I made, I suggested that we
settle on episode 0:33 of the December 2nd session as the breakthrough moment for the pilot
study. In this moment, we were comparing two different designs for a river of forces that
Andr and I had created individually to decide which one would serve for the further
development of the system, and we were very excited about each design's differing strengths
chose the moment because of our progress on both the method (supporting the workshop)
and the system, as well as the serendipity that at the time of making our choice for a
breakthrough moment, we were also implementing an early version of the system with clients
I transcribed the identified episode and thought about how to visualize the improvisational
nature of that episode and the metaphors in that episode to get at answers to the how were
versions of the transcript while re-listening to the episode a few times. The most fitting
technique I could think of to indicate the improvisational dynamic is through logical force, a
heuristic from the coordinated management of meaning (CMM), which uses four forces that
work on every conversational turn: prefigurative force, contextual force, practical force, and
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implicative force (W. B. Pearce, 2007). Together, these forces shape what can happen in the
turns we take. In applying this heuristic, it seemed most logical to look at how turns either
increased the flow of conversation through logical force or how turns in the conversation
changed the depth of the flow or changed the direction of the conversation. Below, one
annotated version of this transcript serves to illustrate the outcomes of this step. In the
transcript, the color codes show this improvisational dynamic. I also kept notes about my
own meaning making of the dynamic, which are displayed as comments in the margin of the
This breakthrough moment was central to the further development of Embodied Making.
In order to prepare for the reflection session with the design team to determine how the
metaphors in the breakthrough moment became embodied in the system at the time of
reflection, I gathered related design artifacts that were discussed in the breakthrough moment
and that resulted from the breakthrough moment as interim steps towards the finished system.
I gathered all these in a presentation to help guide our reflection. This presentation included
Figure 6, Figure 7, Figure 12, Figure 13, Figure 16, and Figure 17.
Reflecting on the Analysis, the Design Artifacts, and the System (Stepping 7)
As a next step, I planned and chaired two sessions, one with Indranil and one with Andr,
to reflect on the analysis so far and on the current state of the method and system around the
question, What sense do we make of our improvisations with the river of forces metaphor in
the design process as reflected by the breakthrough moment and design artifacts on the one
hand, and the embodiment of that metaphor in the method and the system as it is today on the
other hand? The reflection session with Indranil was on March 9, 2014 and the reflection
session with Andr was on March 28, 2014. I recorded both sessions with the Livescribe
Both reflection sessions provided very rich data. I decided to make full transcripts of each
for further analysis as I felt that both these reflections held substantial answers to the research
question as conceived by the research team. I also wanted to ensure the working of action
inquiry as a method for analysis of this data, so I first transcribed the reflection session with
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Indranil and performed some initial analysis on that transcript to develop a sense of how the
method worked.
I analyzed about 18 turns of the reflection with Indranil using a specific setup of action
inquiry to see whether the method helped me with analyzing the data to find answers to the
research question. My intent was to analyze enough of the data to make a judgment about
the working of the method and the implications of working with the method in this way on
all the data. I also wanted to receive feedback from my dissertation committee about the
research design before analyzing all the data in this way. Figure 20 below shows one page
from this analysis and serves to illustrate the level of analysis I was getting at with turns 4 to
10 of the reflection transcribed in the left column and reflections from the three perspectives
of action inquiry (individual, interactional, and organizational) in the right hand column.
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Figure 20. Illustration of action inquiry analysis of several turns in the reflection with
Indranil.
Figure 21 below displays a further analysis of turns from the same transcript using action
inquiry's four territories of experience as explained above. It serves to illustrate the level of
analysis that the full application of action inquiry would afford. I reflected on the data using
reflections on the application of the method to the transcript of the reflection with Indranil.
This way of analyzing helped me test the applicability of action inquiry to the data and reflect
Figure 21. Action inquiry's four territories of experience used to reflect further on the turns
in the reflection transcript.
At the end of the pilot study, I recorded my reflections on the research design for
discussion with the research team and my dissertation committee. After receiving feedback
from the team and the committee, I made several changes to the research design. My
reflections and research design changes are discussed in the next section.
Firstly, the choice to study the process of creating Embodied Making and Business
Elements turned out to provide more than enough data to explore answers to the research
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question. Because of the enormous amount of data gathered over the years, we were required
to make choices in the research process that limited the amount of data to a manageable size
for analysis.
By starting with the system and the method as they came out of the design process, we
were able to use the metaphors we identified to focus only on the data that were relevant to
those specific metaphors. In effect, we could distinguish between rough data (recordings,
design documentation) and data identified as relevant by our first reflection (recordings and
breakthroughs we thought relevant for metaphors now embodied in the system and design
artifacts that were used to create those metaphors or parts of the system). By further focusing
in on the data in each successive step of the research process, the amount of data slowly
became manageable. For example, by focusing on one specific breakthrough moment in the
whole process and then using that moment to gather relevant data from all the sources
available, we succeeded in building a rich and coherent set of data representing the design
process and its outcomes that we could then use to guide further design team analysis in our
reflections.
Despite the amount of data we had recorded and available, we sometimes missed a
recording for a breakthrough moment that we remembered. For example, the first recordings
that I found with relevant content for the pilot study were of October 2011, two months after
we had started the process of creating Embodied Making. Fortunately, this first recording
was itself a reflection session looking back at the first 2 months of Embodied Making, which
was helpful in recovering details about design artifacts such as the circle and squares diagram
in Figure 3.
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While listening to recordings, associations with other systems that we created were
sparked and possibilities for discussing certain literatures were identified. So the listening
for one thing (improvisations with metaphors for designing the system up to that point) also
invoked ideas for others (new metaphors for designing the system going forward). Noting
these ideas was important so we could choose to revisit them, and for taking other routes
through the data in a later stage. For example, while listening to the reflection with Indranil
of October 2011, around minute 0:44 of that session, I found us referring to John Sowa's
work on analogical reasoning (Sowa & Majumdar, 2003). As described above, Sowa's work
later became a cornerstone for the creation of Business Elements. I noted that Sowas work
in analogical reasoning might later become important for discussing the findings of this
study.
In deciding on next steps during the pilot process, we were not regularly having Friday
afternoon Embodied Making sessions. I often had to take Andr and Indranil through steps
separately. In addition, I did not record every part of our pilot journey, but I did record the
reflections themselves. There seemed a difficult balance between recording everything while
remaining practical and goal focused, both for research and for practice.
While transcribing the breakthrough moment, I was reminded that there are many levels
of depth and detail at which one can analyze a conversation. The 18 turns that I analyzed of
the transcript of the reflection session with Indranil were valuable, but this level of analysis
created too much data to be a feasible approach. I also considered applying Goodwin's
(Goodwin & Goodwin, 1987) conversation analysis techniques, which have ways to describe
non-verbal gestures, pauses, and other data enriching features. At this point, it seemed to
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make sense to apply such techniques to only some of the data, especially where we felt
something really important had happened in the larger unfolding story of how a metaphor
emerged or took root in the method and the system. Striking a good balance between breadth
of process coverage and the depth of analysis seemed very difficult. I discussed this
challenge in several conversations with my dissertation committee who all shared this
concern.
moments. I explored the effect of applying a rigorous conceptual metaphor analysis using
the leading edge method developed by Rohrer and Vignone (2012). I tried to gain access to
the automated systems that were becoming available for conceptual metaphor analysis
(Barnden, Glasbey, Lee, & Wallington, 2003; Barnden & Lee, 2001; Huang, Huang, Liao, &
Xu, 2013). However, in personal communication with both Vignone and Rohrer, as well as
with Barnden, I learned that applying a manual analysis required a focus on detail that would
obscure the broader question posed by this dissertation. Current automated systems for
metaphor analysis only work on corpus content. A too detailed or technical level of analysis
would divert the focus from the interactional nature of generative and conceptual metaphor in
the context of systems design that I hoped to get at in the data. What emerged was that
action inquiry, as a cohering middle ground between relevance and rigor, would provide
enough structure to make sense of how the metaphors became embodied in the system that
we had created.
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At points, I wondered if I could use our own method, Embodied Making, as the research
method. It was designed specifically for making sense of complex situations. I quickly
concluded that this would make things too complex. It could lead to a form of recursive
Integrating research and practice, by doing action research in our own organization with me
as both a co-designer and a researcher of the method and the system we are investigating,
which themselves are made to make sense of complexity, and then using that method and that
system to do the research, sounded attractive in one way but way too complex in another.
sources that informed its creation, like CMM (Pearce, 2007), organizational improvisation
(Barrett, 1998; Hatch, 1998; Weick, 1998), complexity theory (Kurtz & Snowden, 2003;
Shaw & Stacey, 2006; Stacey, 2001), systems design (Schn, 1983), and architecture
(Alexander, 1964, 1979, 2002; Alexander et al., 1977) also feature in the literature review
Rather than getting lost in this recursive reflexivity, I reminded myself of the practical
goals of our research team. Why did we think it could be important to increase our
awareness of our improvisations with metaphors while designing a system? Because fitting
generative metaphors embodied in a system can help the people using it more easily generate
would work through the cognitive unconscious to reduce or even prevent this generative
capacity from emerging. Refocusing on the abducted relevance of the research helped me
I provide one illustration of how the pilot data lead to findings and a discussion in the
research team that, in turn, reflected back on our practice. This illustration also shows how
such findings lead to new directions to further literature review for making sense of the
findings.
In my reflection session with Andr, we noticed that, in his early designs for our
Embodied Making tooling, he chose blue as the color for forces (see Figure 13 above). This
color was induced by the generative metaphor of the river of forces. In the bta version of
Embodied Making, however, forces were red/orange (see Figure 17 above). Andr wondered
why this was so. A few turns from the transcript illustrate our finding and our discussion of
the situation:
1. Sergej (S): Then I have this one, which is a paper based workshop as part of the
Workisgaming project. And which you can also consider a system, even though it's
rough right. Hexagons cut out...
2. Andr (A): Mmmh.
3. S: Got the colors wrong.
4. A: Yeah.
5. S: Yeah, you see? Because these are the solutions.
6. A: Well, wrong...but yeah, yeah,
7. S: And these are the forces. Anyway, different.
8. A: Yeah.
and solutions are yellow, which is the color of sand or mud, or branches you know?
Dirt in the water. Could be green.
64. S: Mmmh.
65. A: So, we added, some of the metaphor really directly impacted the visual
elements.
66. S: As you created this one for example.
67. A: Yeah, that was the reason for the call actually. So that matches the metaphor
here. And you will only see it when you know it. But you see the forces look like
water.
68. S: Yeah, streaming around something, in this case a solution element, yeah.
69. A: But then that got lost because we didn't share the same metaphor with
[designer]. So he just sees colors and replaces it with something else.
70. S: Yeah, so to a sense it also gets lost in additional design conversations. If we
don't persist the metaphor consciously to the next designers.
71. A: Yeah, so if we invited [designer] and say like OK, we see this as a river of
forces. And because of this river of forces we see solutions emerging based on these
forces, then maybe we could, would have a different look and feel. By bending the
metaphor, you see it goes quickly, you know?
In another data artifact, we found a hint at an answer to the question of what might cause
such a shift in the generative power of the river of forces metaphor. In this picture, we saw
the results of a workshop that I facilitated with a group of farmers (see Figure 16 above). As
our tool was not ready by that time, I had created a paper prototype. Under some time
pressure in the morning before that workshop, I cut out hexagons (a key shape in Embodied
Making) in three colors: red, blue, and yellow. Without much conscious thought, I assigned
red to forces and blue to solutions. In the workshop, our newly hired designer was also
present. He was the designer of the interface for the redesign of Embodied Making and
Business Elements and he never saw Andrs original sketches for Embodied Making. He
only had the workshop experience with me and the tools and experience that he as a designer
brought to the task of creating the interface for the system. Considering the conceptual
metaphors implicit in this story, we could argue that blue-colored forces as an entailment of
the river of forces metaphor is more apt then red-colored forces as an entailment of the river
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of forces metaphor, but that red is a more apt color for the idea of forces than blue. We could
also argue that solutions being blue is more apt in the context of a river metaphor than
If we follow color theory, it is possible that my unconscious color switch was influenced
by conventional conceptual metaphors for red and blue (OConnor, 2011). Whatever the
cause, my choice was now embodied in our system, despite all our work on the generative
metaphor of the river of forces. Perhaps conventional forces persisted through conceptual
metaphor and kept our design from being generated with our desired metaphor. When I later
inquired with our designer, he mentioned that his conscious choice for red/orange for forces
was driven by another generative metaphor that he chose to support the identity of our
organization: the chakra system. In this system, orange and red are the base and forceful
chakras (Douglas, 2002). This feedback enriches the discussion with another applied
The data gathered and identified as relevant for the metaphors embodied in Embodied
Making and Business Elements were enough to analyze the process of how they became
The two reflection sessions on the river of forces metaphor with Indranil and Andr
provided enough data for answering the research question from the research team's
Action inquiry continued guiding us through the complexity and the amount of the data.
It offered enough breadth and depth to cover the overall case study and to dive deeper into
If desired, specific findings could be analyzed in more detail later using more detailed
I decided to continue the analysis of the full reflections transcripts to identify and reflect
According to the research team, our improvisations with metaphors result in several forms
HERACLITEAN RIVER OF FORCES) that became embodied in the system that we were
Even though we have improvised with many differing metaphors in the process of
creating Embodied Making and Business Elements, in retrospect only a few of those are
clearly emerging throughout the whole process as being embodied in the method and the
system itself. These are the forms and metaphors that we have consistently returned to at
Indranil and I were well-read in Embodied Realism when we started the study, but we
conceived of the meaning of metaphor in different ways. For example, Indranil and Andr
did not see the circle, the square, and the hexagon as metaphors while I did see them as
metaphorical. Indranil and Andr pointed out the practical nature of mathematical form,
while I saw a clear analogy between the concepts (experience and representation) and the
sources (circular and square) that we used to reason about them. It seems that the potential of
our knowledge in making sense of meaning through metaphor is itself subject to a process of
social construction even if we start from the same definitions and try to work with them in a
consistent way. These differences in our meaning making of metaphor have not prevented us
The persistent improvisations with the river metaphor resulted in adaptations of the
theories, methods, and practices integrated into Embodied Making and Business Elements
that were helpful in applying those methods together coherently. By integrating the logical
forces of CMM and the contextual forces of Alexander's design method as forces in the river,
one new way of describing both communicative and architectural forces emerged. The
consciously chosen metaphors work to integrate other concepts into the system coherently.
The persistent improvisations with the river metaphor resulted in a method and a system
that are quite different from existing methods and systems, especially in the interface used to
interact with the method and the system. Where we initially listed forces linearly using
existing IT systems (like in Figure 5 above), the river metaphor, aided by the circle, square,
and hexagon forms, slowly changed this list into a hexagonal grid with colors representing
river-type functions: brown stories, blue forces, and yellow solutions. This change in the
form of the interface was supported with systems components coherent with a river metaphor
on every layer of the systems architecture23. This supports the idea that a generative
metaphor has the potential to create an IT system that is quite different from current systems.
the metaphorical entailments of a river applied to a system, unforeseen changes occurred that
only became conscious in retrospect. The changes in the color of forces and solutions
occurred because our new designer was using a different metaphor for redesigning Embodied
Making and Business Elements. And even though that metaphor was consciously chosen for
23
In the dissertation, I do not expand on the layers of the technological architecture under the interface
of Embodied Making and Business Elements, but it seems that either selective perception, or a broader trend
towards process as central to technology, was emerging at the same time that we were developing the method
and the system. For example, a return to functional programming (away from object oriented programming)
helped us to choose development languages that were more conducive to flow than to form.
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the design of a different system, the logo and house-style of Product Foundry found its way
into Embodied Making as well. In our own analysis, this occurred because we were not
consistently sharing the metaphor of the river with our designer at the time of this redesign.
This supports the idea that the generative force of a metaphor may become nonconscious
after a longer period of use by designers who take it for granted, especially as they feel the
task of embodying it in the system is done. When new people join the design team, other
metaphors generate more force than the embodied metaphor, changing the system in a new
direction.
In this specific case, I changed the color of the system myself at one point as well. This
occurred in a moment where the river metaphor was not consciously present. This may have
reinforced our designer's decision to persist his metaphor in the redesign, and it only occurred
Reflective practice, as exercised in the context of this dissertation, increases the capacity
to notice such changes in the embodiment of metaphors into the system. Reflective practice
also provides possibilities to more consciously generate the desired metaphors for the system
This chapter describes how I proceeded with the study after concluding the first cycle of
data analysis. In September 2014, I had decided to leave my position as a partner in Product
Foundry. As a result, my perspective changed from being intimately involved in the research
team to being an independent researcher interpreting the findings of the research team. The
research team, while supportive of my task of writing this dissertation, was not so much
interested in the reflections back to the literature as in answering the research question to
improve their practice. While they acknowledged the profound way in which the literature
had informed the design of Embodied Making and Business Elements, the specific type of
rigor required for writing a dissertation about the process was beyond their purpose. This
growing tension was one of my reasons for choosing to leave our partnership.
The cycle described in this chapter takes a more rigorous and objective perspective on the
data generated in the case study with the goal of identifying ways to reflect the results
reported in the previous cycle back to the literature. What options for discussion emerge
from the analysis of the findings? What questions remain open from the research team's
This chapter also marks the boundary between an action research approach and a different
approach to this research study, even though for me as a consultant interested in the design
process of systems, it is part of an ongoing action inquiry into my own designing and
reflecting on designing.
From the pilot study and the reflections on that study by the research team and dissertation
committee, it was clear that there were many options for further exploration of the data to
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arrive at possible answers to the research question. As I continued analyzing the data, I
became overwhelmed with the range and depth of possibilities and was at a loss for how to
record them and keep track of them. When I reflected on this feeling of being overwhelmed,
I noticed that it was not so much the time it would take me to process multiple perspectives,
but that the tools at my disposal to record and organize findings according to the mix of
methods I was using would be very limiting in their capacity to support a comprehensive
analysis. Once I realized this, I recalled that there was qualitative research software available
that might support me with this complexity. After a brief review of several options, I decided
After exploring NVivos features in a trial period, I felt assured that it would be able to
help me apply multiple methods to the data while at the same time enabling me to organize
the data and the analysis in ways that other tools could not. I first used NVivo to gather all
relevant sources for analysis and to create a model of the relationships between the sources to
guide an initial analysis. This model is displayed below in Figure 22. Data classification
The data are classified into five categories. Design sessions are represented by the design
session recordings and the handwritten notes captured by the Livescribe Pulse smart pen. All
sessions were exported as Livescribe .pdfs and then imported into NVivo.
Design artifacts are all materials that we developed in order to create the system and range
from images, drawings, .pdfs, documents, screenshots of Wiki pages in our teams
collaboration system, and presentations prepared for design meetings. The system consists of
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the formal descriptions of the method as published in documentation at the time of analysis
and the working system at the time of analysis. Metaphor identification sessions consist of
recordings and handwritten notes, transcripts, and mindmaps. Reflective sessions consist of
session recordings and notes, as well as the transcripts of the reflection sessions.
Once all the data were organized this way, I redid the analysis of the metaphor
identification session and coded all relevant data that we mentioned in that session using
NVivos labelling system. Whenever a design session, design moment, or design artifact was
mentioned, I made a cross reference to that data point and coded it accordingly. This way, I
created a network of paths through the data that is logically related to the reflections we made
and was therefore easy to navigate in many different ways. For example, in the short excerpt
displayed in Figure 23, all data points are marked with a red highlighter and contain links
Figure 23. Illustration of coding in transcripts to refer to data (recordings and design
artifacts and outcomes).
I then organized the coding to reflect what relevant data the research team had identified
This way, I was able to identify 34 sources in which (eventually) 193 observations
relevant to the research design were made. These were organized as identified breakthrough
sessions and moments, design artifacts (that we created ourselves), design inspirations
(resources that we used to create the system), metaphors we used to create the system, system
components that we named that embody the metaphors, and reflections on the research
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process made by the design time during the data analysis (which could be important to revisit
Using NVivo to Code the Research Teams Own Findings and Discussions (Stepping 12)
As a next step, I used NVivo to analyze the transcripts of the two reflection sessions with
Indranil and Andr twice more. I first analyzed the transcripts from the perspective of us as a
research team. Whenever we found something ourselves, I coded it as design team analysis.
When the finding was a sense making of how the metaphors had become embodied in the
system, I coded the finding as such. This resulted in 50 points where we as a design team
Using NVivo to Analyze Findings and to Code Options for Discussion (Stepping 13)
looked at the design teams analysis and sensemaking. I wrote two memos describing the
findings and thoughts about options for further discussion. I coded the memos with these
labels and went through each coded passage to assign a literature that I thought relevant to
ground the options for discussion. The results of this step are displayed in Figure 25, which
shows 35 findings and 89 options for further discussion categorized under 11 topics.
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I copied the memos that I created while analyzing the transcripts of the reflection sessions
as well as relevant passages from the reflection session transcripts to illustrate the findings
I analyzed the data references labeled with options for discussion to regain a feel for their
underlying data. I also made a quantitative assessment of the number of times an option for
discussion emerged and used this to identify four main topics for further discussion.
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Throughout the above presentation of findings, options for discussion emerged. Using
NVivos function to label data, I composed a model of the options that I could use as a
starting point for making a coherent discussion of the findings. Figure 26 above shows the
model that summarizes the options for discussion with a quantitative value for each option
that shows how often that option emerged while analyzing the findings.
In total, the analysis reveals 84 options for further discussion of the findings. The four
Metaphor ontology;
CMM;
Reflection-in-action/reflection-on-action;
Metaphor Ontology
review above: conceptual metaphor theory, generative metaphor theory, and linguistic
metaphor theory applicable to differing findings and generative metaphor theory applicable
in a more general sense to about 10 of the findings. If we look at the specific data that I
labeled from these perspectives, there are several moments in which conceptual and
generative metaphor theory come together. In my analysis of the reflection with Indranil, I
note that
Our semantic structures for [...] movement, obtainment, etc. are quite abstract
metaphors under the surface of the system's functional user interface. It would be
interesting to explore the literature on metaphor in systems design to see if there are
similar reversals from source to target where source becomes more abstract than
target.
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This is a reflection on the following exchange in the reflection between Indranil and me:
34. Indranil (I): And of course, the final step to come up with the solutions. So if we
look at applying embodied making, then the role of metaphor is very strong. And then
we faced a lot of challenges, as find the shortcoming of a metaphor, of an analogy in a
solution space. I'm struggling a bit now with the hexagon canvas on business
elements, with the next bunch of things that we have to do. The complexity there is
quite high, and.. you find, you know just because we're not product ... Yeah, so a
product is an informational entity. So the metaphors you apply there are how you
think about information. So, a product for example is, let's say, a bottle of shampoo to
a car, and then you want to identify the information that's common between these two
because you want one architecture for product yeah?
35. Sergej (S): Hmhm.
36. I: So say you have things like identity, how you can identify it, so all the
intentionality that goes around the product yeah?
For the design of our system, and for the purpose of creating a more coherent review of
the literature, it might have been relevant to find an answer to the questions Indranil poses
above. This is also supported by the earlier conclusion that the design team held differing
conceptions of metaphor despite having started from the definition of metaphor as suggested
by embodied realism. In many reflections, we wondered and differed about the meaning of
the concepts metaphor and analogy and about their mutual relationships. A more thorough
discussion of metaphor might help to be more coherent in using metaphor in the design
process.
In the literature review, I argued that generative metaphor is related to social construction.
CMM is a communication theory that embodies the philosophy of social construction (Barge
& Pearce, 2004; W. B. Pearce, 2006). As discussed in the methods chapter, CMM is
concerned with how communication creates our social worlds. According to CMM, we get
what we make and we make it in communication. CMM provides several tools that can help
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a researcher take a communication perspective to show how the turn by turn communicative
action of people shapes their selves, their relationships, their culture, and their systems.
The data that are labeled with CMM and specific CMM heuristics invite further analysis
into the specifics of our sensemaking. Logical forces analysis might reveal differences and
practical and implicative force) or the desire to better and deeper reflect on the past (more
contextual and prefigurative forces). LUUUUTT analysis, which explores the tensions
between stories lived (L), stories told (T), and storytelling (T), might further inform our roles
in the design process, especially by identifying the unheard, untold, untellable, and unknown
stories (UUUU) that did not become become part of the design process. An analysis of the
nature of the speech acts in our turns might reveal style differences in our improvisations,
especially when framed in the four categories of speech acts suggested by developmental
action inquiry (DAI): framing, advocating, illustrating, and inquiring. This might also reveal
in more detail how we improvised with metaphors. The outcomes of such deeper analyses
might then in turn be reflected off the literature to make more sense of the joint improvisation
The findings that are labeled for discussion through Schns concepts of reflection-in-
action and reflection-on-action (Schn, 1983; Yanow & Tsoukas, 2009) synthesize between
the applications of metaphor in our design process and the way in which we improvise with
these metaphors. Discussing these data points from these perspectives and relating them to
the two sections above, as well as relating the findings from that discussion to the literature,
offers a reflexive way of looking at the improvisations as they happened in real-time and in
retrospect, helping us to better make sense of the improvised nature of the design
conversations and the process of embodiment of the metaphors in those improvisations from
conversation to system.
Theoretical Framework
In the findings, several sections are marked for direct relationships with the theoretical
this study above, these additional direct relationships reveal the following:
After identifying the options for discussion, I decided to write a first full draft of the
and inquiries and their feedback, I could analyze the situation as it stood at that point and
In the academy, it is not a habit to include direct comments by the dissertation committee,
but I do want to highlight the process of feedback, reflection, deliberation, and emergence of
the way forward that was induced by the conversation with my committee in a way that helps
me and my readers make sense of how this not only provided input for planning the next
steps, but also how it structured the process of writing this dissertation. In doing so, I believe
I do justice to the action research approach that I embraced and to the complex nature of the
process that is a central topic in this dissertation. Therefore, I chose to add the current
section, which shows how I worked with the feedback on the first draft in creating a design
Based on the first draft, the committee challenged me to choose one topic as central to the
discussion and to use the other options as means to support that central topic. My committee
also urged me to scale back on the amount of detailed reporting that was present in the first
draft. What follows is a summary of how I made sense of this feedback and how I mapped
my way forward.
seemed the central process around which the others revolved. Metaphor ontology was the
most central concept that emerged from the analysis. Reflection-in-action emerged as central
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because it fits well with the improvisational process of system design. In the data which I
labeled with this term, we continuously shift levels between designing, thinking about the
design method, wondering about the meaning of a term we use, and then making a concrete
decision as to what form the reflection would get in the system. Schn (1983), who
developed the concept, was a musician himself and used improvisation as a metaphor to talk
CMM could have been another way to achieve the same result, not as a topic for
discussion, but as a method for further analysis. CMM provides ways to look at the design
process data that could have surfaced more of the improvisational dynamic in our talks, and a
further analysis using CMM might have provided support for (and raised new questions and
challenges to) the conclusions of Chapter 4. However, in my view, these conclusions provide
more support for a return to the literature than for further data analysis. Another way in
which CMM was suggested as a topic by the comprehensive data analysis was as data itself.
As CMM was one of the sources inspiring Embodied Making and Business Elements, it
might be interesting to look further into how it became embodied in the method and the
system. This, however, would expand the relevant scope of the data again and might trap us
In Chapter 4, I conclude that each of us in the research team differs in perspective on the
meaning of metaphor at many points during the design process. The comprehensive data
analysis supports that point by showing how we differ at many other points and that we also
pose many questions that a further review of the literature about metaphor might answer.
The dissertation committee also challenged the literature review about metaphor.
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Specifically, Frank Barrett wanted to see a better understanding of Mark Johnson's (2007)
later thinking about embodiment and also suggested looking at the work of Turbayne (1971)
and Sarbin (2003) on metaphor and myth, and to the work of Avital on the concept of
I found it logical that the literature framework itself could not be a central topic for
discussion. As far as I was concerned, the role of the literature framework in the discussion
was to provide coherence when bringing the discussion back to a bigger picture, to fuse
scholarly discussions to reflect findings back-to and as an instrument to help guide the
decision making for what to focus on in the discussion. The gaps in the literature that I saw
at this point were between the ideas of organizational improvisation and the ideas of
embodied realism. A specific search on those two terms yielded no results on Google
improvisation" yielded only 11 results on Google Scholar (two of which are my own
contributions, one of which is Romi Boucher's, and one of which is Daan Andriessen's; both
close colleagues, friends, and one a member of this committee). The article that addressed
both concepts most relevantly discussed them in the context of Weick's (1998) disciplined
imagination, which is a reflexive practice for design that uses metaphor as well (Cornelissen,
2006). This search result felt like a guidepost that supported the idea of making reflection-in-
action the central topic as it reinforced the argument already made to use it as a bridge
Using NVivo to make a comprehensive analysis of the data worked well because it
created some level of control over the complexity and the amount of the data. It provided
ways to create paths through the data and to reflect on the data all the while leaving trails that
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could later be used to explore the richness of insights that we made throughout the three
years of designing Embodied Making and Business Elements. Without using software like
NVivo, choosing what to discuss would have been a mostly intuitive process. NVivo enabled
a quantitative assessment of the topics emerging most clearly from the data and thereby was
This section discusses the findings of a further and deeper engagement with the literature.
First, I review the literature on the concept of reflection-in-action. Then I provide a further
review24 of the generative, rhetoric, and embodied aspects of metaphor to further increase our
Reflection-in-Action
As I discussed in the literature review, Schns work was influential in the scholarly
conversation about metaphor and design. My reflection on the findings in the data gathered
and analyzed in this dissertation, which endeavors to understand how we can consciously use
sustain their currently embodied metaphors, surfaced the process of designing and our
reflections in and on action as a central topic for understanding this process of transformation
of metaphor to system.
Schn is a key author in both the literature on the process of designing and the literature in
the role of metaphor and analogy in design. Schn (1983) says that reflection-in-action is the
process through which professionals reframe the setting of a problem in order to come to
better fitting solutions for a complex and uncertain situation. In contrast with what he calls
the paradigm of technical rationality, in which research is separate from practice, thinking is
separate from doing, and means are separate from ends, reflection-in-action treats all of these
24
Chapter 2 of this dissertation provides a review of metaphor. The review in this chapter expands that
review along the lines of the kennings of the first two research cycles. As a result, it may occur that
some of the review in this chapter is perceived as repetitive. This repetition only serves to provide
context for the expanded discussion in this chapter.
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Schn induces the qualities of this process of reflection-in-action from a number of case
studies that vary across professional disciplines including architecture, psychotherapy, town
planning, and management. He sees the common elements of the process emerging in the
shared characteristic of how professionals reflect-in-action between cases selected from these
professions. Independent of the language, priorities, images, styles, and precedents inherent
to these specific fields, the process of reflection-in-action starts when professionals are
interrupted in the flow of their work. They come to a dead-end in the problem solving
relative to their work situation. In a reflective dialogue with the situation, often in interaction
with others, they turn attention back from solving the problem to the setting of the problem.
Professionals surface the way the problem was set and reframe it so that a new context for
problem solving is created. They re-approach the situation, well aware that they are dealing
with a unique instance of a phenomenon that they have much experience in, but which
requires a unique approach. By approaching it as a new case, they are open to the differences
of the situation. After reframing the situation, professionals try to understand the unique
features in the situation this time around. After assessing the features, they conceive a
direction for solving the problem and perform a global experiment to feel if this direction
holds. Next, they weave a web of possible moves in the newly framed situation through
which they develop a system of consequences, appreciations, and implications for further,
more detailed moves. They adapt the situation to the frame and examine unintended
examine how the situation talks back and further shape the solution to fit the gestalt of the
emerging conversation with the situation. Through a process of detecting and correcting
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errors in the web of moves, and through a continuous re-appreciation, re-invention, and re-
global what-if? to a recognition of local implications for the situation, back from an
involvement with the local unit to a consideration of the total, and from exploration of the
situation to commitment to the solution. This shifting back and forth and back again is
guided by a reflexive awareness of the designer's intent and the surprises that surface in the
In the process of reflection-in-action, Schn notices an additional four qualities that help
to deal with the situation by appreciating the feedback from the context they try to shape.
They look for coherence and direction emerging from their reflecting, and they keep inquiry
moving to ensure that the process keeps taking turns and moving towards a convergent
experience with similar situations and use this experience as a guide to discover the
differences that make this particular situation unique. Professionals who engage in
testing. The alternations between intent and surprise either lead to confirmation of the
on other mediating technologies, visualizing the context, the setting, the solution, and the
way forward. Perhaps most critically, Schn mentions the reflective practitioners stance
towards inquiry as reflexive of both themselves and the situation. In professionals reflecting-
in-action, there is an appreciation that by engaging with the situation, they are shaping it
while they are also being shaped by the situation. Schn (1983) ends his description of the
[The practitioner] must be willing to to enter into new confusions and uncertainties....
He must act in accordance with the view he has adopted, but he must recognize that
he can always break it open later, indeed, must break it open later in order to make
new sense of his transaction with the situation. This becomes more difficult to do as
the process continues. His choices become more committing; his moves, more nearly
irreversible. As the risk of uncertainty increases, so does the temptation to treat the
view as the reality (Schn, 1983, p. 164).
This focus on attitude directly relates with the theories and research in metaphor as
discussed above and below because metaphors are central to the process of generating the
new from a situation, while they are also central to how the old tries to persist itself through
the situation. Vice versa, because of the natural way in which metaphors work with us, they
are themselves reflexively conducive to the process through which the new can quickly
become the familiar, or the new old that we commit to. In order to explain this, I will
further detail the theories and research in metaphor building on the introduction of the
concepts in the literature review. After this, I will return to reflection-in-action and place
Schns original work as presented here in the context of the latest insights from the
literature.
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My own engagement with metaphor started when Daan Andriessen said that I should take
a look at Lakoff and Johnsons (1999) philosophy in the flesh. He said that if he would have
read this book during his own dissertation process that it would have turned everything on its
head (Andriessen, 2005, personal communication). I tend not to take such strong advice
lightly, and as someone playing with ideas for his own dissertation, I dove into the book right
away. For a long time since that advice, Lakoff and Johnsons perspective, first called
experientialism (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), and later embodied realism (Lakoff & Johnson,
1999), dominated my sensemaking of metaphors. Around the same time as Daan gave me
his metaphor advice, I had founded jazzinbusiness, a jazz band with which I helped people
experience the metaphor of improvisation through experience with the art and engaged
dialogue with the band and between the participants about how they could use that
experience to make sense of complex issues in their work-lives. My feeling since those days
has been that if metaphor is so important to how we think, then there should be theory and
research out there that helps us understand how we make metaphors work in practice.
However, the literature that I found from that time onwards seemed to fall into either one of
three broad categories, only some of which used Lakoff and Johnsons perspective on
metaphor in systems design (Oates & Fitzgerald, 2007; Tippett, 2004). The work either built
on Lakoff and Johnson's embodied realism and engaged in uncovering the metaphors in use
for important subjects (Andriessen, 2006; Andriessen & Gubbins, 2006; Casasanto & Jasmin,
2012; Herrera-Soler, 2006; Inns, 2002), performed psychological experiments that observed
the entailments of metaphor in peoples perceptions or behaviors (Kille et al., 2013; Larson &
Billetera, 2013; Morris et al., 2007; Sullivan, 2015; Zhong & Leonardelli, 2008), or looked at
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metaphor in design but did not refer to Lakoff and Johnsons work (Indurkhya, 2006;
Kaptelinin & Czerwinski, 2007; Melles, 2008). It is fair to say that over the past few years,
more and more work is emerging that does address the issue specifically from the perspective
of conceptual metaphor, even if it does not take a deep dive into the entailments of embodied
realism (Bakker, Antle, & Hoven, 2011; Casakin, 2012; Hoshi, 2012; Kelly, 2014).
Fred Steier pointed me to Schns (1993) chapter that introduced me to the notion of
generative metaphor. Schns way of seeing metaphor was exactly what I had been looking
for in explaining the working of metaphor when used to design interventions with metaphor
consciously, but searching with the specific term of generative metaphor did not yield
much in terms of literature other than the work of Barrett and Cooperrider (1990) and
Srivastva and Barrett (1988), who seem to be the few that have followed up on working out
In writing the first version of the literature review for this dissertation, I got stuck on
gathering support for the duality that was emerging in my mind between the conscious and
nonconscious applications of metaphor. Also, in the first version of the literature review, I
had not fully reported on Mark Johnsons evolving work after 1999 (Johnson, 2007, 2014).
way to better understand some of the questions left open by the experimental psychology that
based itself on embodied realism. Nonetheless, my search was for literatures that would help
me better relate the two worlds of conscious and nonconscious, as well as the application of
metaphor in designing new concepts, especially in information systems. I was lucky that
Frank Barrett, in reviewing my dissertation draft, pointed out the work that he did with
Sarbin (Barrett & Sarbin, 2007; Sarbin, 2003), which bases itself on Turbaynes (1971) view
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of metaphor. Turbayne's work provides a great perspective on the interplay between the
deliberate and non-deliberate use of metaphor and the way that the conscious and
nonconscious operate interactively in the minds of the metaphor creator and receiver to move
metaphor from its innovative first use to being taken literally. I also went back to the
reference lists of the literature in generative metaphor to see if I could go back further and
find out how this notion of metaphor had first emerged in Schns thinking. Through this, I
found Schns early work on the displacement of concepts (1963/2011), which lays out his
theories of metaphor and analogy. Daan Andriessen finally pointed me to Steens most
recent work (2014), which can be framed as the most recent linguists response to conceptual
metaphor theory.
Having shared these signposts emerging on the metaphor map I am trying to make here, it
is now time for a deeper exploration of these partial perspectives on metaphor. I will first
describe the perspectives as they were originally presented in their time, and then proceed to
discuss them in the light of the most recent studies. In the next chapter, I will create a model
that integrates the four perspectives coherently as a mirror to reflect relevant data from our
own process of working with and reflecting on metaphors in the design of a new process and
system.
becomes aware of a new concept. Through the interactions between our bodies and the
framing one thing in terms of another. Once these expectations are no longer met, we need a
new concept to make sense of a situation. In the process of the emergence of a new concept,
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there are two perspectives that seem to be at odds with each other. On the one hand, there is
the radical perspective on the emergence of the new concept. This view seems to embody a
degree of mystery in how a new concept arises. It seems like there is an unconscious agent
inspiring the rise of the new concept in the person from the outside-in. On the other hand,
there is a conservative perspective that tries to retain as much of the old concept as possible.
recombination of existing concepts in which the whole that emerges is the sum of its parts.
Schn shows how gestalt psychology is an embodiment of the mystery perspective, bringing
psychological insights into our perception to suggest a subtle way of mystifying the process
of the emergence of new concepts. He contrasts this with scientific method, which he
describes as a way to subtly reduce the complex process back to its parts.
Schn argues that the scientific perspective cannot hold, but he is also critical of the
gestalt perspective. He proceeds to explore this perspective in more detail. He expands the
view of metaphor and analogy as they work in the process and shows that in the displacement
of concepts, the linguistic notion of metaphor as naming one thing in terms of another is a
starting point for understanding the relationship between a concept and an instance but in
itself is not enough to make sense of what happens in the displacement. Comparison by
analogy also fails to account for the process as this only shows the similarities and highlights
the differences between the old and the new. A focus on the errors, the ways in which the
comparison through metaphor or analogy fails, also contributes to the emergence but is not
enough to explain the mystery. The normal attributes of comparison, error, and the
application of a concept to an instance are prerequisites but not sufficient to explain the
displacement.
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What is it that truly expands our view so that the new concept arises as a whole?
without concepts. There is a distinction between the two but not a separation. Because of
this relationship of interdependence between concept and instance, both are changed in the
concept of polishing after someone showed him that polishing is actually a process of
scratching. The scratches induced by polishing are so small that we cannot see them as
scratches with the naked eye. The polished object thereby appears smoother than before the
polishing. The new concept of understanding polishing as a kind of scratching changed both
Schns concept of polishing and his concept of scratching. By being applied to the instance,
the concept changes the instance, and by this same application the concept itself is also
changed. Once we have the new concept of this, it is difficult to remember the experience
of both concept and instance changing as we tend to re-order the process retrospectively,
thereby obscuring the displacement that occurred. This same retrospective sensemaking also
requires that we stick to a new concept quickly after it has been formed as we have adapted
to it and through it (Schn, 2011, p. 8). He summarizes the four patterns that distinguish the
projective models.
4. For each of these projective models, aspects of B are seen to be related in A-like
ways where we had not been attentive to those relations in A before. (p. 58)
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Metaphor and analogy are the means used by this process of displacement that leave
traces in our experience and language. These analogies and metaphors are everywhere in our
language, and attempts to get at the bottom of this, for example through etymology, will
always keep surfacing new questions. Schn implies that the reflexive juxtaposing of one
metaphor with another is a key to understanding the evolution of ideas. From a cultural
perspective, metaphors can therefore be seen as gifts or ties. According to Schn, our
emotive, and feeling-related. Making the effort to see one concept as another is the key to
this work served as a foundation for both his ideas of generative metaphor and the theory of
displacement of concepts towards the practice of creating new products, while the other is a
further specification of the same process applied to how we think in the action of creating
those products (or services) and how we are ourselves changed through the process of doing
so. Schn (1963/2011) also prefigures the role of the nonconscious and unconscious
dimensions of emotions, feelings, and interrelationships between concepts, and our embodied
striking that both Johnson and Schn go back to Dewey (Schn wrote his dissertation on
Dewey) as one foundation for their thinking about conceptual thought. Finally, Schn
prefigures what Turbayne talked about at the same time (in the early 1960s) regarding the
rhetorical power that metaphors can have over us nonconsciously, which will be the subject
For Turbayne (1971), metaphor is not something that exists per se but rather something
that is at work in the interaction between metaphor producer and receiver. Assuming a
metaphor producer is aware of his or her use of metaphor as metaphor, the producer pretends
that something is the case when it is not through the crossing of different sorts (Turbayne,
1971, p. 3). The nature of metaphor is that either the producer can be taken in by his or her
own device or the receiver is unaware of the use of metaphor. In this case, metaphor is no
The pretense that something is the case when it is not requires awareness. The dropping
behalf of the producer, the metaphor is hidden, either through disguising or masking. For the
receiver, the mask blends with the face, or he or she is being used by the hidden metaphor.
This also happens without awareness. It is better to say that the metaphor producer that hides
a metaphor can see the receiver being taken in by the metaphor. For the receiver, there is no
metaphor: He or she faces literal truth. In this case, there is metaphor confusion, which,
1. The two ideas that are crossed share the same name, which plays into our belief in
identity.
2. We are not always told that the two ideas are different (hiding or masking).
As the similarities of a metaphors two sorts are stressed, the differences become
suppressed. When the story of a metaphor is told many times, it comes to be taken more
give in to its use at some point and it then moves on to become commonplace. After it is
commonplace for a long time, it dies, or rather, becomes hidden. We now take the metaphor
literally to the extent that we take it metaphysically instead of metaphorically. Once, through
our confusion, we become aware that we are being used by metaphor, we have no choice but
Barrett and Sarbin (Barrett & Sarbin, 2007; Sarbin, 2003) show the process of metaphor to
myth at work in the war on terror. Even if the politicians that first voiced the term were
aware that there can be no such thing as a war on terror, their political commitment to the
metaphor makes it unlikely that they will nuance it once the entailments become clear in
reality. As they use the metaphor as a guide for action, budgets are allocated, troops are
deployed, and the metaphor becomes a reality. Barrett and Sarbin (2007) show that
unmarked and non-transparent metaphors are more likely to be taken literally and proceed to
undress and re-allocate the confusions behind the war on terror metaphor by showing how a
reframe of terror as a criminal activity, rewarding serious police investigation, might lead to a
Turbaynes view is valuable as it highlights the rhetorical aspects of the use of metaphor
and provides a critical perspective to start dealing with metaphors before they start dealing
with us. As we have seen in the literature review, those studies that started surfacing
conceptual metaphors in use in a number of contexts, even if they do not refer to Turbaynes
work, are providing us with critical perspectives and methods for undressing and re-
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allocating metaphors. Charteris Black (2013), for instance, built on notions of metaphor to
create critical metaphor analysis. Peterson (2009) critically analyzed the allocation of
funding to technologists metaphors for human being, showing how BRAINS R US and
MAN IS A MACHINE attract more funding than more organic and process-based metaphors.
Rohrer and Vignone (2012) critically analyzed bank CEOs use of metaphor in the
congressional hearings on the financial crisis, showing that by pretending the financial crisis
is a natural disaster, the men and women making the decisions in the financial system cannot
Johnsons contribution to the field of metaphor is best known through his long time
collaboration with George Lakoff (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, 1999). Johnsons latest work,
however, is possibly the most significant for our understanding of the process through which
metaphor evolves (2007, 2014). Before I summarize Johnsons unique contribution in some
detail, I will first summarize the evolution of Lakoff and Johnsons key ideas about
conceptual metaphor.
Lakoff and Johnson (1980) argued that the meaning of metaphor goes beyond the
linguistic and is conceptual. Metaphorical concepts include both a thinking process and a
linguistic expression. Metaphors highlight and hide. Argument is war, for example,
highlights the aggressive and confrontational nature of argument, while there is also a
understanding remains hidden in the use of the concept of argument as war. From the use of
a metaphor, entailments follow logically; in this case, attacking, defending, taking down
ourselves onto the world. Our experience of our bodies as closed objects gave rise to
wanted to name. Therefore, our earliest metaphors can be found in expressions like being
in danger, moving out of an area, the front of the house, and so on. Building on these
Love is a journey where we can be in planes, trains, and automobiles, for example, provides
one of many coherent domains for reasoning about love. Argument is war can be expanded
to the attack of the buildings that make up our arguments. So, in addition to taking down
someones defenses, we can also demolish the foundations of their arguments. What makes
the workings of conceptual metaphor especially intriguing is that they are also used to make
sense of the concepts of language and communication themselves. The dominant structural
receiver. While it is easy to provide examples that highlight our understanding that meaning
is context dependent and differs for sender and receiver, the highlighting of the objective
meaning of our main conceptual metaphor hides this important perspective time and again.
Lakoff and Johnson (1980) see three stages in the development of metaphors, from novel
simply become replaced but are often extended with the addition of new expressions like the
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novel metaphor, love in the fast lane, which extends the conventional metaphor LOVE IS
A JOURNEY, while some remain simple and do not develop much further, like the foot of
the mountain. For Lakoff (1987), a metaphor is dead once its etymological meaning is no
longer conventionally shared in the culture. Lakoff and Johnson (1980) show how a new
metaphor can be designed but point out that creating a new metaphor and having it adopted
in culture is hard work. Probing beyond metaphors for language and communication, they
argue that our concepts of objectivism and subjectivism are also metaphorical and therefore
incomplete. From their argument, it follows that if concepts are metaphorical, then truth is
Later, Lakoff and Johnson (1999) present evidence that the embodied nature of mind and
the cognitive unconscious give rise to conceptual metaphor. They show that cognitive
science gave rise to a new generation of research based on the theory of the embodied mind
(Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991) and how the converging evidence from this second-
which there are systematic correlations between our physical and emotional experience,
conceptual metaphors arise in the mind and in language. In the embodiment of mind, neural
embodiment, phenomenal experience, and the cognitive unconscious are interrelated levels of
embodiment that together give rise to new concepts and sustain existing concepts. They
change experientialism into embodied realism and introduce the notions of primary and
As reported in the literature review above, Lakoff and Johnsons work started a
experience and decision making. Strikingly, only a few have taken Lakoff and Johnsons
work to the design of new metaphors or made the connection with the other metaphor
More importantly for this discussion, Johnson went on to probe deeper into the
nonconscious aspects of the emergence of metaphor in thinking and language. In his book,
The Meaning of the Body (Johnson, 2007), he takes some key, recent outcomes of second-
James and John Dewey to explore the working of the cognitive unconscious, specifically the
According to Johnson, through our body-environment coupling, which he sees, after Dewey
apply a cross-modal sensory perception to the flow of experience. This means that our
senses work together to make sense of our experience. Johnson reports research where
babies were blindfolded and given either a smooth or a textured smoother. When the
blindfold was removed and the babies were presented with the two different smoothers, their
gaze would settle on the one they were actually given. Studies like these confirm that our
senses work together in making sense of our experience. Our senses work closely with our
emotions and feelings to make further sense of what happens in experience. Johnson
mentions vitality affect contours, a term that captures the complex collaboration between
cross-modal sensual perception and the emotions and feelings arising from the flow of our
experiences. When a mother caresses her baby, she may stroke the baby's back in a rhythmic
manner while at the same time giving a verbal, music-like accompaniment of aaah, the
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strength of which varies in synch with the strength of the stroking: starting softly, taking on
strength as the stroke and the aaah progress, and ending lightly when the aaah ends and
the hand leaves the back of the child. The neural circuitry, the phenomenal experience, and
the cognitive unconscious work together to embody what Johnson calls vitality affect
contours. In this process, there is no clear distinction between perception and conception.
As the physical experience meshes with the emotional, and we experience feelings of being
loved through a mostly nonconscious process, the concepts of rhythm, tension, release, and
warmth are all co-arising in our body-mind. From this, it is a small step to the image
schemas that support the collective sensory experience of our body projections to the world
as a foundation for primary and complex metaphorical thinking processes. Johnson does a
great job at laying out the philosophical and research bases of the nonconscious embodied
process that precedes the formation of metaphors (if we take a circular metaphor to
conceptualize the continuity of experience, which may not do justice to its complex, non-
linear simultaneity, but given the limitations of writing on paper, it will have to do for
pragmatic purposes).
A juxtaposing of theories and research on metaphor is not complete without the linguistic
perspective. There is a community of researchers who have slowly and skeptically accepted
the notion of metaphor as conceptual, and from this community, some valuable critiques
were proposed to complement the conceptual view of metaphor. Steen (2010, 2014) and his
group of researchers, for example, who we can see as representatives of the linguistic
perspective, say that the arguments for the unconscious or nonconscious aspects of metaphor
have kept metaphor theory captured in psychological experimentation, which has only served
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to prove the theory itself correct through circular reasoning. They suggest that we shift
perspective from the conscious versus nonconscious distinction to the distinction between
attention. According to Steen (2014), only 1% of all metaphor use is deliberate, and this is
where the action is. Steen says that deliberate metaphor use affords conscious metaphorical
thought but that this conscious metaphorical thought does not always happen. In that sense,
Steen mirrors Turbaynes view that one can either be using metaphor or can be used by
metaphor (from the perspective of the metaphor producer) or take the metaphor literally
(from the perspective of the unaware receiver). Rohrer and Vignone (2012) support Steens
argument for focus on the deliberate use of metaphor but criticize his method, which, as
rooted in a linguistic perspective, focuses on the lexical units in analyzing metaphors, while
The concept of reflection-in-action is one way in which Schn has integrated his views on
the process of designing. A close read of the concept in concert with reading his older work
on the displacement of concepts and his later work on generative metaphor shows a
continuity of the same questions over a longer period of time: How can we analyze the
messiness of real processes and the emergence of new form in those processes in a way that
does justice to the reality of the process while, at the same time, trying to distill the patterns
that give coherent form to those processes and forms? Even though Schn uses
develops that metaphor as a metaphor in his work, but the analogy between his work and the
The review of the generative, rhetoric, and embodied views on metaphor provides a
comprehensive and coherent theory of metaphor both in the process of the emergence of
metaphors in thinking and language and in their deliberate application in rhetoric and design,
but there is no scholarly relationship between the metaphor design thinkers and metaphor
process thinkers. Other than having appeared in handbooks together from time to time, they
dont refer to each other in their key works (see, for example, Gibbs, Jr., 2008; Ortony, 1993).
Therefore, there could be value in unifying their views in a coherent meta-metaphor frame.
Schn and Turbayne were mostly concerned with deliberate applications of metaphor; the
not been further developed other than in one chapter in Lakoff and Johnson's, Metaphors We
Live By (1980), where they expand the metaphor love as a collaborative work of art. Barrett
and Cooperrider (1990), who discuss the effects of a generative metaphor intervention, and
Andriessen (2008), who let two groups design interventions for a knowledge management
problem based on different metaphors for knowledge, specifically love and water, can be
considered as three of the few who have experimented with generative metaphor in practice.
Schn (1993) mentioned metaphor in the chapter for the handbook edited by Ortony but
didnt develop the notion further as metaphor (because we can argue, as I will next, that in
his process of reflection-in-action, he does further develop the concept, but implicitly). Other
literatures that look at the application of metaphor in design either do not mention one of the
four major theoretical perspectives reviewed here or take metaphor as given to the
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application in design and do not develop a concept of metaphor itself beyond Aristotles
definition.
The newly emerging insights from critical metaphor analysis, still mostly focused on the
existing use of metaphor but implicitly asking the question of how to employ metaphor with
rhetorical responsibility for the design of generative systems (Charteris-Black, 2013), do not
The linguists contributions to conceptual metaphor theory are mostly skeptical towards
that strand of the conversation and add some value in highlighting deliberate metaphor use.
At the same time, the linguists consistently display only a surface reading of conceptual
metaphor theory and research. They also fail to notice scholars like Turbayne who argued
I return to action inquiry as the method with which to approach the creative act now due.
I do not mean this in an instrumental way; I mean to use action inquiry as a context for
organizational layers of this dissertation that play in the act of creating a solution from the
deeper engagement with the literature that helps me make more sense of the research
question. My intention for this section is to take the emerging insights from the literature and
becoming while doing this, I may remain aware of, and share, my intent, thinking, feeling,
senses, behavior, and the effects I perceive as the person making this inquiry. In using action
inquiry, I may also remain aware of the dialogical nature of this process in which I frame,
advocate, illustrate, and inquire together with those behind the literature and with those
behind the data gathered and used in this process. Finally, action inquiry may help me
abstract to the organizational level where we can assess this performance from a more
objective stance and see how the strategies applied for this inquiry develop into a new vision.
Deeper engagement with the literature followed from my analysis of the reflections of our
design team on the outcomes of the systems design process of Embodied Making: a design
process and system that supports designers who want to create systems that are fit to deal
with complex design tasks. To discuss our own findings, I chose to focus on reflection-in-
action and to provide further synthesis of the different ways in which we have conceived of
metaphor.
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In approaching the task of making something out of the different, yet overlapping
limitations of written form and the meaning they express. Using the process of reflection-in-
action, I approach this task with a focus on what is unique in the problem setting of this
specific situation, and while bringing all my experience to bear intuitively into that situation,
I feel that the process of displacing concepts is most comprehensive in addressing the
inherent complexity of the process. I realize that my approach here seems to impose layer
upon layer of reflexivity on the situation. One risk of doing that is that this may become
other. I feel the desire to bring some comfort to the situation by giving it a coherent form in
advance that helps make better sense of what is emerging. I am reflexively aware that if I do
that, I impose a metaphor onto the situation that will highlight certain aspects while hiding
others. I am also aware that when I do not, I give in to letting your own experience shape the
situation inductively and possibly nonconsciously. This would be unfair, as it is my task here
to add something new to the discourse. It is also a connotation of what I have found so far
that there is no end to trying to find a foundation for doing one or the other as there is no
foundation to this process other than a metaphorical one. I am also aware that as a result of
my findings, I must at least go as far as possible in laying out all these forces shaping the
Feeling that I have shared enough of a frame for reflexivity, I take the displacement of
concepts perspective first because of the strength it provides in giving us as a result of its
inherent complexity. There is no strict linearity to Schn's process other than the way he
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starts with his desire to understand a situation in the moment and by bringing to that situation
between two equal concepts in which the displaced concept assists with a new sensemaking
of the other, and by which the meaning of the displaced concept itself is changed through that
mutual engagement as well as the concept that was used to start the interaction. With this
issues that critics of Embodied Realism have found in the work of Lakoff and Johnson; most
prominently, it addresses the linear, one directional nature of metaphor mapping implicit in
Lakoff and Johnson's (1980, 1999) use of source and target domains, which do a good job of
showing how one domain is the ground for reasoning about the other but do a poor job of
highlighting the mutual interactive displacement back from target to source that takes place
in that process. Rather than going into what that makes of Lakoff and Johnson in an
argument as war, I would like to shift focus to argumentation as a collaborative search for
agreement. Therefore, let us reverse direction back to what adding Schn's perspective
contributes to their theory, how a displacement of Schn's theory affects the meaning of
embodied realism, and how that process of displacement, in turn, shapes our understanding
The key similarity between the displacement of concepts and embodied realism is in their
joint use of metaphor as a matter of thought and seeing the world. The key difference
between the two is the meaning that Schn gives to metaphor relative to the meaning that
Lakoff and Johnson assign to metaphor. Both acknowledge the comparison by analogy that
pays in the juxtapositioning of two sides of a metaphor, often illustrated in the literature with
Figure 30. Conventional way of displaying source and target domains in embodied realism.
The left circle of this Venn diagram shows what embodied realism calls the source
domain, and the right circle shows the target domain. The union of the two circles shows the
analogy between the two domains. One of the analogies between the displacement of
concepts and embodied realism is that they share a similarity in how both conceive of
follows:
In the reflexive application of the displacement of concepts to embodied realism, the last
connotation has no analogical entailment in embodied realism. In the Venn diagram above,
there would be an aspect of the displacement of concepts that falls outside of the union of
both domains that has no entailment in embodied realism. When applying an Embodied
Making-framed conceptual metaphor analysis, one would stop here because this disanalogy
would be ignored. I might even argue that because of a disanalogy, our nonconscious would
not even notice and focus on the analogies. But since I started by reflecting in action on
applying the displacement of concepts as the displaced concept, there are two additional tasks
in this analysis.
The first task is to apply a generative seeing-as. If we see embodied realism as the
displacement of concepts, we would also try to answer the question of what it means to see
concept-type ways where we had not been attentive to those aspects in the displacement of
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concepts before. I argue that the most salient aspect of embodied realism reflecting back on
the displacement of concepts is the exploration of the workings of the cognitive unconscious
phenomenal experience, and the details of the working of the cognitive unconscious in our
Schn thought that these intimations were preconscious, emotive, and feeling related.
different sources that this intimation indeed works on the continuum of feelings, emotions
and the cognitive unconscious. The source domain of displacement of concept leaves the
interaction with embodied realism enriched with a vocabulary that addresses its intimation
and adds structure to our understanding of the mysterious side of its theory by reflecting the
latest insights from science and philosophy. The displacement of concepts adds to embodied
realism its notion of interactive, relational co-shaping of concepts that takes place in a
displacement of concepts, thereby mitigating the implicit hiding of this interactivity entailed
potential for pursuing the possible meanings of initially apparent disanalogies. Embodied
realism and its emerging methods, in turn, add to the displacement of concepts detailed
techniques for identifying and analyzing the metaphorical traces that remain in our language
In visualizing the complex interaction between the two concepts based on these emerging
insights, the Venn diagram would not work well because it does not show these complex
interactions other than in the union of the two circles. We would somehow need to break out
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of the closed Venn circles displayed above to see how the context outside of the union, and
possibly even beyond the two circles, is at play in the process of displacing and reflecting
back between the concepts. One way of accomplishing that would be to think of the
process. In Venn's original work, he took into account such contextual embracing of the one
Figure 31. Venn diagram that includes the context of target domain. Adapted from
File:Venn0110.svg - Wikimedia Commons. (n.d.). Retrieved November 29, 2016, from
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Venn0110.svg. Adapted with permission.
However, the closed nature of the circles and the mathematical connotations of the set
theory used to explain this picture only go so far as to show us how the one concept can
transcend its own meaning to form a context for the other. It still does not show the complex
displacement, reflecting back, and interpenetration that takes place in the fourth step of
Schn's (1963/2011) process, nor does it account for the ambiguous nature of intimation and
A potentially better way to visualize what happens in the interpenetration of the two
concepts from the perspective of the displacement of concepts may be an image of two
Figure 32. Two interpenetrating spirals. Retrieved from Decorative, Ornamental, Vortex
(n.d.). Retrieved December 12, 2016, from https://pixabay.com/en/decorative-ornamental-
vortex-1359974. Reprinted with permission.
This image does justice to the equality, openness, and divergent unfolding of interaction
between two concepts as they co-evolve with each other. While this visual does much to
support reasoning about the complexity of interaction between two concepts, it still hides
much of their differences and does not represent the interpenetration of the one in the other,
except maybe in their origin (if you take the two concepts as flowing out of a source
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together) or conclusion (if you take the two concepts growing towards each other to some
Johnson (2007) argues that the most important conclusion of his work is that aesthetic
experience is the foundation for philosophy and reason. If our cross-modal sensory
perception is the basis for emotions and feelings, and if these, in turn, give rise to the image
schemas that give rise to metaphorical thought, which then becomes more precise and literal,
then we may be served best by invoking the arts to help us find a more apt visual for the
interactive interpenetration of two concepts that shape each other, Taiji comes to mind. Taiji
is the Daoist way of illustrating the dynamic interaction of a dualism in duality. The figure
below is an illustration of Taiji as it is most often displayed. Taiji is better at showing the
interactive joint growth of two concepts as they embrace each other in their displacement. It
is also more effective at showing how one interpenetrates the other, thereby changing its
meaning. In addition, the circle that embraces yin and yang in their dance bounds the idea of
the eternal or ineffable (Wuji in Daoism) where the phi spirals are unbounded. But while the
meaning of Taiji is to express the continuous dynamic movement between Yin and Yang who
form the two sides of its dualism, the image is often interpreted as the contrast that Yin and
Yang express. Its integrative and dynamic nature is often lost as the focus is drawn to the
Figure 33. Taiji symbol. Reprinted from ChaowanGov. (2015). Retrieved November 26, 2016,
from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Flag_of_Yin_and_Yang.png. Reprinted with
permission.
Therefore, consider the more artful representation of Taiji below. Here, the dynamic
nature of the meaning of Taiji is better captured by the two fish swimming with each other.
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Figure 34. Taiji as two koi representing Yin and Yang in a more dynamic way. Reprinted from
FreeImages.com/mineiove. Retrieved November 12, 2015, from
http://www.freeimages.com/photo/taichi-fish-1154020. Reprinted with permission.
This image provides additional generative capacity to Taiji by showing the displacement
of concepts as an embodied, enactive process where one concept experiences itself while
seeing the other. It changes our perspective from us, as readers of this text, looking at an
image representing two concepts, to us as readers looking at two living agents expressing two
concepts while they interact. The fish, as fish, represent two different concepts, while at the
same time, the fish, as living beings, actively express and experience themselves in
interaction. We can imagine the one fish swimming to be in the place of the other and vice-
versa. With this living metaphor, it becomes easier to understand the dynamic process of
swimming with each other, the concepts literally displace one another, experience their
interaction, and evolve while doing so, while each retaining a pattern of identity over time as
a distinct koi. Thompson, Steier, and Ostrenko (2014) use Bateson's (1972) idea of deutero
action25. The Taiji visual of the fish affords reasoning about this while retaining the inherent
The fish as active agents also provide a more dynamic tension because they make it easier
to imagine their dance reversing direction, going different places, or stopping altogether in
search for different dances or concepts as changing intentions drive them or as changing
circumstances require them. The water also helps us realize that there are limits to their
horizon. They can only see so much of the context in which their concept-dance takes place.
This idea keeps us open to the almost limitless breadth and depth of the oceans.
The third element in the visual metaphor of the two fish representing the interpenetrating
process of Taiji is water. This element of the image serves well to help us make sense of the
third coherent concept in metaphor theory; that of the complex and subtle distinctions
between intention and attention, between deliberate and non-deliberate use of metaphor,
between conscious and nonconscious metaphorical thought, and between the metaphysical or
metaphorical experience of a situation. As Turbayne (1971) points out, you either have a
metaphor or the metaphor has you. Even if you have the metaphor, your repeated use of it
will let it have you over time. Barrett and Sarbin (2007), building on his notions, mention
that if the metaphor is used to create guides for action, we have started on the path from
25
To emphasize the inter-aspect of interaction. The authors play on Schns use of dashes in the
original reflection-in-action.
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metaphorical to literal truth: The war on terror metaphor becomes an actual war on terror,
failing in many ways as there cannot be such a thing; the financial crisis is a natural disaster
that becomes supported with measures that fit natural disasters, like the TARP (Temporally
Asset Relief Program) whose acronym also refers to a type of shelter. All of this works
together to take attention away from the men and women that actually made the financial
system what it is. As Steen (2014) helps us see, the one percent of the deliberate use of
metaphor is where the action is. The deliberate use of metaphor affords conscious
metaphorical cognition but often achieves the opposite as our cognitive unconscious
processes the metaphors as literal truth. Kim Pearce (2012) uses the same metaphor when
From birth to death, we are swimming in patterns of communication. And for us,
these patterns are ubiquitous and mostly out of awareness because we are never not
engaged in them. We feel the consequences of our communicating, just as [fish]
experience the consequences of polluted or healthy ocean waters, but we don't "see"
the patterns themselves. (K. Pearce, 2012, p. 32)
Even if we assume that fish know what water is, we can still assume that they are not
conscious of water as water most of the time. The water in which the fish in Figure 34 swim
helps us to make sense of the complex interactive spectrum of communication that affords
the use or being used by metaphor as laid out by Turbayne, Barrett, and Sarbin. Critical
metaphor analyzers like Charteris Black, and especially those who start from the perspective
of embodied realism like Peterson, Vignone, and Rohrer, help us to probe the temperature,
depth, force, and flow of the water in which our concepts swim, and they assist us in
wondering about the occurrence of deliberation and intention in the experiencing or the
making of conceptual currents and waves: Are they the ocean's or the fish's? The dynamic
nature of the visual also makes it easy to imagine one fish to be in the place of the other the
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next moment. There, subject to the forces that the other made in the water, the fish embodies
the entailments of the metaphorical traces left there, affording it to make one small move
We can also imagine both fish being equally aware of the water, using it to deliberately
generate waves that help both of them understand, in a playful dance in which the one
displaces the other, what the forces generated in the water mean towards their mutual
understanding of a new situation. The addition of water as a third element expands our view
of the fish as metaphors, to the fish as metaphors enmeshed in metaphors. It expands the
meaning of displacement from a focus on the concepts to a view that includes both the
concepts and the concept makers/takers. In human reality, the two are always intertwined.
Or, as Pearce, Sostrin, and Pearce (2011) summarized the practical entailments of CMM
theory,
We make it in communication;
If we can get the pattern of communication right, the best possible things will
MMIIRR
Figure 35 brings the key concepts discussed above together with the Taiji painting of the
two fish. In order to help us remember what the picture represents, I chose the acronym
has the logical order of the sentence: "reflexive reflection in-inter-action with meta-
metaphors" reversed for two reasons. Firstly, the acronym MMIIRR both reveals and hides a
mirror helping us to remain reflexively aware that this model, as all others, is a reflection of
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itself. Secondly, the imperfection between the sentence as a truth and the twist in the
acronym serves to reflect the imperfect nature of the design process, its artifacts, and its
outcomes.
The concepts and their relationships in the MMIIRR mean the following:
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In order to frame the picture, I use Pearce's (2007) application of Gadamer's horizon of
understanding to social worlds. Pearce says that, Horizons are the natural limits of sight;
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they mark the end of what can be seen, but with no sense of confinement or impediment.
Within horizons, our social worlds appear rich and complete with no visible limits (W. B.
Pearce puts the concept of horizon in the context of encountering the other who might
want to challenge our horizon from his or her own social world, aware, or unaware, of his or
her own horizon of understanding. The application of this concept to MMIIRR both bounds
and opens it, and it reflexively prefigures the more specific notions in the image. The
concept seems coherent with Wuji bounding the image of Taiji in Daoist philosophy. Wuji
might be interpreted as our joint horizon of understanding. Anything beyond it is beyond us.
In Daoism, human understanding begins with Taiji, the dynamic duality of the dualism yin
methodical rigor with mysterious emergence in a process that we now know is enabled by
our neural embodiment, phenomenal experience, and the cognitive unconscious. Guided by
these structures of being, we are drawn to perceive our experience of this process and its
outcomes as literal truth. If, however one of the two fish, or even both fish, retain an
awareness of metaphor as metaphor, both as generative and embodied, the potential for
reflexive displacement emerges where both concepts evolve their meaning as a result of their
joint interaction. If only one of the two attains the meta-metaphor awareness, the potential
can go in either of two directions: revelation of the metaphor for joint generative potential or
a continued (intentional) hiding of the metaphor for directed persuasion. In this case, fish A,
blinded by the light, fails to see what lies below, while fish B, seeing the light inside its
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In this chapter, I will use the model that emerged from the discussion to reflect back on
the data to see how one can help us make sense of the other.
Figure 36 shows the MMIIRR model that emerged from Chapter 10. It shows the two fish
symbolizing both sides of a conceptual displacement. In summary, the model shows us that
that A is B-like, which leads to an exploration of B in A-type ways. In this dyadic process,
aspects of B are seen as related in A-type ways. Through this displacement, the meaning of
displacement. The two fish making these displacements in the visual metaphor chosen here
will never do this in exactly the same way twice. Also, through the process of reflecting in
action, they go beyond the analogy, beyond what they have in common. They use their
displacement to understand what is unique about the other, and through the other to
understand what is unique about themselves. Through this whole process, they also come to
understand what is unique about this instance of the situation that they find themselves in.
This process is helped to a great extent by the neural embodiment, the phenomenal
experience, and the cognitive unconscious. These three are in a continuous concert across
the spectrum of self, other, and environment; across fish A, fish B, and water C, helped by
metaphorical thinking that emerges in primary metaphors and complex metaphors. This
possible in one way and helping it to become nonconscious in another. Where displacements
through reflection-in-action are generative and conscious, novel metaphors arise. When
novel metaphors become conventional, generative force remains, but it becomes embodied
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and hidden from consciousness. The traces of displacement are still visible in language, but
the process of meaning making is offline and cognitively unconscious. Awareness of these
two mutually reinforcing and mutually dissolving ways of metaphor might lead to one fish
while the other is not (anymore) aware of water as water, or metaphor as metaphor. This can
occur without manipulation or persuasion of the one by the other, when one just sees a
metaphor and the other just sees literal truth. Like people from two cultures, they could still
make do without having to overcome this difference in experience. But it might also occur
that the fish that is aware of metaphor as metaphor uses the hidden generative power of that
metaphor to influence the other fish, making metaphorical waves in the water that the other is
not aware of as water, and will swim into, not knowing that these waves were made by
another fish. These waves might be intended for any purpose, educational, persuasive, or
otherwise. But not knowing what waves are, the other fish will take them literally.
What can we see when we analyze data from this study through this visual meta-
metaphor? I selected three episodes from the data that were labelled as options for
discussion and that were labelled as reflection-in-action, generative metaphor, and metaphor
ontology. Reflection-in-action was used as a label for sections that clearly displayed parts of
that process at work as a conscious search for solutions while applying knowledge about
metaphors. Generative metaphor was used as a label for parts of the design conversations
where the research team was clearly using a seeing-as to generate possibilities for further
designing the artifacts and/or the system, and metaphor ontology was used to label sections
where we reflected about metaphors and how they work as such; in other words, where we
focused on our tools rather than on applying them. Below, I will discuss three episodes that I
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titled circle, square, hexagon, river; from a river of forces to business as a landscape; and
As the research team, we were reviewing the outcomes of our design process with a
method for designing complex systems called Embodied Making and a system supporting
that process called Business Elements. The question was, what metaphors did we see in the
system and how conscious were we in wanting to make those metaphors part of the system?
and making the system. A first few turns that were of interest are below:
The circle, the square, and the hexagon are three geometrical forms that were central to
the design of the process and the system of Embodied Making. The circle is used to
experience. One of the first principles that we formulated in the process of designing
Embodied Making was that the value of any representation is directly proportional to its
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proximity to immediate experience. Figure 37 shows the first design artifact that we
Figure 37. First Embodied Making visual representation. It shows the two metaphors,
EXPERIENCE IS CIRCULAR and REPRESENTATION IS SQUARE. In this diagram, the
key forms to understanding the case study are the circles and the squares; the text of the
diagram is not important to read here.
The circle, the square, and the hexagon are also the first forms that come to the teams
mind as a response to the reflective question what metaphors we have embodied in the
system. The hexagon (see Figure 13 above for one of the first hexagon design artifacts) was
devised much later in the process when we were moving from the design of Embodied
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Making as a process to the design of the Business Elements system supporting Embodied
Making.
Andr and Indranil both remember different moments for the circle and square to emerge:
10) A: This was not in the [client name] meeting. This was one of our Friday sessions
where we are discussing experience. The more you experience, the more you
know what you don't know because your experience becomes bigger. I think you
[points to Sergej] did it. You drew a circle. We were talking as well about how
can we combine this with what we know. If you make the overlap big enough
with experience, the solution space becomes bigger.
Figure 38 shows the handwritten notes that Andr is referring to. They were made in a
meeting where the three of us were preparing for a meeting with a client in which we were to
present the design process of embodied making for the first time. The visual is a recursive
evolution of Figure 37, where the research team meant to express how in modern Western
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methods, thinking takes precedence over experience, or rather, frameworks and tools are used
influencers of this way of thinking, captured in Descartes I think, therefore I am. We said
that in Embodied Making, we are not arguing against this but we rather want to integrate
experience with this approach on an equal footing, and to highlight this, we talked about
Figure 39. My handwritten notes of Embodied Making design session on April 13, 2012.
Figure 39 shows the image that Indranil created as a first logo for embodied making. We
see the circle and the square evolving from the handwritten diagram in Figure 38. The
overlap between circle and square is maintained, the arms representing the recursive flow
between the one and the other, and, as Andr points out, the subtle contrast between the
placement of the circle representing a head and the body as the square.
14) S: What struck me is that in the particle language there are also circles and
squares. Was this a conscious choice?
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Figure 40 shows the visualizations of the particle language, a design artifact we came up
with later in the process. Here the circles and the squares were applied to John Sowa's
(2000) ontology as a foundation for creating business elements, the system supporting
embodied making.
Figure 41. Particle language based on Sowa's (2000) ontology for Business Elements
system.
15) I: I don't want to over-think this too much, because they are such basic traits. A
circle is math perfection, and so is a square. From a young age we tend to
understand that these are two shapes that are very powerful. It really depends
how you put the one in the other how they make you feel. Circle in square feels
good, the other way around feels like the square is puncturing the circle. Pretty
basic, you learn an appreciation for both shapes pretty quickly right? Easiest
shapes to draw. Are they metaphorical? You see traffic signs in these shapes too.
They're there for a reason right?
16) S: Yes, they also seem to fit with key philosophies that they represent.
Nietzschian eternal recurrence. Cartesian grid.
17) I: The first time I started enjoying math was with geometry, Euclid.
18) A: First thing I learned is that in a triangle the squares add up to 180 degrees. So
learning how to draw a perfect triangle.
19) S: Good question, to what extent are the two actually metaphorical.
In the sections below, this episode from the data is analyzed using the elements of
MMIIRR.
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Process of Reflecting-in-Interaction
The reflective session from which the data in the episode above comes was deliberately
process and that are now present in our system and to reflect on the meaning we made of
them in joint interaction during the reflection. The reflective session was guided by questions
The awareness of metaphor as metaphor differs between the three researchers and also
shifts over the course of the conversation. In the first few turns, all of us identify the circle
and the square as metaphors. We also see how the hexagon, which became an important
In turn 10, which refers to the drawing we made in Figure 39, Andr recalls how we
started to bring the circle and the square together and shows that we think about stories as
being in the confluence of both circle and square. Generatively, Andr reminds us that we
mean to expand the circle to expand our experience. The more the circle overlaps with our
knowledge (he uses this term to point to the square), the more stories we have of
experiencing this knowledge. The more we do this, the more we know what we do not know,
and the better we can use our experience to create new knowledge. Andr refers to the
overlap of the circle and the square as the solution space. He drew small circles in the
overlap representing the stories that we have from experience that are reflected in the
knowledge (square). A conceptual metaphor analysis of this episode, including its related
entailments of circle and square in embodied making and in the logical shaping of a person.
In turn 15, Indranil shares his intimation that circle and square may not be metaphorical but
rather math perfections that are with us from early on as they are easy to draw and can be
seen in many representations, such as traffic signs. I both confirm the ubiquity of the forms
by referring to two philosophers that we used to make sense of the two forms ourselves, but
mean it to recover the embodied metaphorical meaning, while I dilute that meaning at the
When Indranil says that we do not want to overthink this, he points to the mathematical
nature of circle and square as an implicit cause for them being nonmetaphorical. In
retrospect, as I write this, I am no longer in a mode where I can access Indranils meaning
making of this turn, so I am left to speculate based on my own analysis. The term
embodied, for us, resonated with the theories and research in embodied realism. But as we
will see in a later episode below, Indranil and I make different meaning of embodied realism.
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sentence, he implicitly says that math perfection is not metaphorical. The literature in
embodied realism, notably Lakoff and Nunez (2000), argues that mathematics is embodied in
experience and is extended from blending an innate capability for subsidizing and estimating
that are based on four grounding metaphors for arithmetic: ARITHMETIC IS OBJECT
COLLECTION (objects of the same size are numbers, the size of the collection is the size of
the number), ARITHMETIC IS CONSTRUCTION (the smallest whole object is the unit, the
size of the object is the size of the number), ARITHMETIC IS A MEASURING STICK
(physical segments are numbers, the length of the physical segment is the size of the
number), and ARITHMETIC IS MOTION ALONG A PATH (origin of the path is zero, point
The ideas of one and zero, two entailments of these four grounding metaphors, are deeply
integrity, and a beginning. The importance of this understanding is that the extension of this
innate capability and the grounding metaphors are extended to all mathematics by conceptual
blending of these grounding metaphors through experiences that give rise to linking
metaphors. Lakoff and Nunez (2000) would argue that even though a circle and a square
may be mathematical perfection, they are still embodied, conceptual, and metaphorical. As
we had never discussed this literature in our reflections, I can assume that Indranil's concept
MMIIRR serve to remind us of the process that gives rise to conceptual metaphor. It invites
us to look deep into the mirror at something that is hard to perceive in phenomenal
experience without extending our senses with the leading edge of theory and research.
Neural embodiment, phenomenal experience, and the cognitive unconscious express the most
metaphorical structures work, and at the same time, they explain how repetition of any
knowledge, including this very knowledge that explains the process, makes us fuse ourselves
with the knowledge and make it unconscious. It is the best explanation we currently have for
why we intimate that A is B-like and for why our metaphorical masks eventually fuse with
our true faces. If a team does not share this understanding and keeps it conscious, it will
always be prone to forgetting metaphors that might be part of making a design work. In the
episode above, there is only one researcher that I can be sure understood this process well
enough to use it in a generative way in the reflection, and even he wondered about the circle
Embodied realism, and specifically conceptual metaphor analysis, helps show how
metaphorically. But a limitation of conceptual metaphor analysis is that it fails to reveal the
displacement of concepts, specifically the notion that an intimation that is A is B-like and an
more complex view on the process of metaphorical becoming. Also, by taking a pragmatic
view and looking for the generativity of metaphor in that process, Schn affords a practical
In the case of the episode above, the intimations that experience is circular and that
representations are square were confirmed by extensive experimentation with the two
concepts in our design process over time. The entailments in the conceptual metaphor
analysis that we remember in this short reflection are only a few of the experimental
outcomes that confirm the aptness of the forms for representing the two ideas of experience
and representation. In the case of the logo where the two switched places, we see a case that
is at odds with the usual way of seeing-as, and therefore, it created some confusion. Such
confusion may be a cue that something metaphorical is going on nonconsciously, and thereby
with an experience where aspects of B are seen as related to A in A-type ways. In the episode
above, this would entail that the research team does not only see experience as circular, and
representation as square, but also that certain aspects of a circle are now seen as related to
experience in experience-type ways, and that aspects of a square are seen as related to
concepts may well be its most confusing, but at the same time, it may be its most profound. I
will briefly repeat Schns (1963/2011) example to aid the sense making here. Schn, when
discovering that polishing is actually a form of scratching, changed not only his concept of
polishing, but also his concept of scratching. In order to assess if a similar change in
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conception occurred in the research team, we would look for instances in the data where we
see, for example, that our concept of circle is applied in a different way to experience in
experience-type ways. From the transcript, it is not directly apparent how the research teams
But from the later design artifacts and systems components, it emerges that the notion of
circles and squares in a consistent way. In the particle language, for example, the two forms
are used in varying forms and functions to represent an ontology of ideas where the primarily
circular forms correlate with the occurrent concepts process, script, participation, history,
situation, and purpose, and the primarily square forms correlate most with the continuant
In the second episode, Indranil and I reflect on the system, design artifacts, and
breakthrough moments.
I: And of course, the final step to come up with the solutions. So if we look at
applying embodied making, then the role of metaphor is very strong. And then we
faced a lot of challenges, as find the shortcoming of a metaphor, of an analogy in
a solution space. I'm struggling a bit now with the hexagon canvas on business
elements, with the next bunch of things that we have to do. The complexity there
is quite high, and...you find, you know just because we're not product...Yeah, so a
product is an informational entity.
Indranil opens this episode by stating that the role of metaphor in creating solutions with
embodied making is strong. The artifact in Figure 41 below shows how we applied the
management application.
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Figure 42 shows an instance of that same metaphor used in solving the forces we had
Indranil also shares a struggle with a metaphor he is having as we are reflecting on action,
and he wants to apply our present knowledge to a metaphor challenge he has with
hexagonal canvas for Business Elements that is infinite. We begin designing the product
element, and Indranil finds it hard to generate product in a landscape. A few turns further, he
says,
12. I: Cells could be prioritized in different ways. Tasks. But there is a danger in
taking the metaphor too far you know?
13. S: If you now say metaphor right? What is the metaphor that you mean, is it the
metaphor of canvas, the infinite canvas, or, the hexagon, or...
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14. I: Oh yeah, its the infinite canvas. The hexagons I don't see as a metaphor right.
It's a mathematical shape that was optimized for. But the infinite canvas is the
business as a landscape. That's the metaphor.
15. S: Exactly, business as landscape.
16. I: And the earth is infinite right, because the earth is round. So you could argue
that you could keep going and never stop right? And when you come back to
another spot, so, no two journeys have to be the same, and when you come back
to a certain spot after circumnavigating the globe you never come back to the
same spot right, because the spot has changed.
Figure 43 shows a screenshot of the Business Elements system, which supports the
Embodied Making design process and which we were extending to support working with
product information. A key feature of the system is the infinite canvas made up of hexagons.
The software system knows no boundary for how far one can extend the canvas in any
direction.
Figure 44. Business Elements version 1.0 with Embodied Making analysis of farmers
workshop. Copyright Product Foundry B.V. Reprinted with permission.
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In his reflection, Indranil repeats what he said earlier about mathematical forms not being
metaphorical. He then shares that he thinks we are taking the infinity metaphor too far.
Indranil places the infinite canvas on a globe to limit the physical space of the canvas but
then transfers the meaning of infinite to time instead of space. When you come back to the
same spot after a trip around the world, the spot has changed over time. This way, Indranil
solves an important challenge for extending the metaphor to product information on the spot.
Product information can have a space, and it can change over time if you make a journey.
Next, I ask him how he sees the relationship between a central embodied making
17. S: When we say business as a landscape. Do you see any relation with the river
metaphors we used earlier?
18. I: I think business as a landscape also sort of emerged right? The infinite canvas.
It just sort of happened, like hey let's make it an infinite canvas.
19. S: That's true, that was also in my mind like a suggestion. Like let's try this.
20. I: And then, when [designer] wanted to put in anchors, the fact that the anchors
were, the anchors were actually landmarks, with the church analogy?
21. S: Yeah, but for me, when he said anchors, indeed for me, you have this river of
forces that you're navigating, and you want to sort of settle down certain things
right, so the thing doesn't just flow on, so I keep this here.
22. I: Ok, so he used the term more from a traditional, a traditional, I think he got it
from traditional applications, like Photoshop and stuff.
23. S: Ah, they use anchors as well right, to secure paths?
24. I: Yes, it's his main tool right? But, I think I changed the term to landmarks. I
think we should actually change the term to landmarks.
25. S: Yeah, a landscape is a broader concept than a river only. And the way we apply
it in explaining embodied making it is tied with forces right. Not the other
concepts that we use, yeah. Like the stories
26. I: The landmarks are important because of that story with the church right?
27. S: Yeah, also the time perspective. Yeah, that's a pretty new story by the way.
Yeah.
Here we are trying to make sense of how the metaphor of a river of forces, concepts we
used in applying it to the system, and the shift to the metaphor of business as a landscape
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cohere. Indranil and I see this differently, and we search for joint meaning. We do not seem
to find it explicitly in these turns. I see anchors as an entailment of navigating the river of
forces, while Indranil sees it as a literal application of a term experienced in the design
tooling of our designer applied to the infinite canvas that Indranil changed to a term coherent
with the landscape metaphor. It leads to some confusion and my follow-up question, which
28. S: Yeah, I only heard it once. And the difference right? The difference. Indranil,
what to you is the difference between analogy and metaphor. And how is it
important in our work for you to make that distinction?
29. I: I think a metaphor has deeper, more, deeper embedding. So when you say, for
example...I wish you weren't so stubborn. I have to push you up the hill all the
time. I wish you weren't so stubborn. We have to always go up the hill...I have to
push you up the hill each time we have a new deal. So a statement like that, there.
I think you're initially making an analogy where someone is as stubborn as a
mule, you know. And then, the metaphor gets embedded and the metaphor
becomes part of the language construction. And so, you know you're bang on
target, etc. I have to push the whole team up the hill, every time we make a
technological change for example. Is that metaphor, is that analogy being
embedded and applied yeah? So, the way I personally see the distinction is when
an analogy becomes embedded in language it becomes metaphor. As long as we're
conscious that something is like something else, and not in the same. So for
example when I am describing the infinite canvas, and how we need to change
anchors into the term landmarks, then I have to explain the analogy you know?
With the church example.
30. S: Ah, I get it. Let me pause, as I understand you, yeah? So you say, the landmark
is a metaphor. I want it to be a metaphor, but in order for it to become a metaphor,
indeed an analogy, the story of the church to explain why landmark is an
important extension of the landmark metaphor to deal with time, for example.
31. I: Exactly.
32. S: Yeah, is this a good way of explaining it?
33. I: Exactly, because then if people understand the landmark metaphor, the
landmark analogy, it becomes metaphor, because then they apply the analogy, and
then it becomes living metaphor. Then they say
34. S: Let's put a landmark here so we don't lose sight of this set of products.
35. I: Exactly. Or let's put a landmark here as a, then basically people start implicitly
understanding that this is a configuration of space. It took me a while to come to
the landmark term right. Because initially, I was using the term standard bearer
remember? A Roman standard bearer. And initially, I was just saying here be
dragons yeah? Because, when you the mythical...You know the term here be
dragons?
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36. S: No?
In this section, Indranil shares his conception of analogy, metaphor, and story and how
they apply to the change from a river of forces to business as a landscape through the story of
a church as a landmark. And he moves onto the next story. A design artifact from the notion
Process of Reflecting-in-Interaction
The process of reflecting on action was predesigned, so the questions that lead us to the
conversational turns selected for this episode create coherence between this reflection with
Indranil and the reflection with Andr. Indranil's style of reflecting on action blends with a
reflection-in-action to set a current problem and come up with solutions for it at the same
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time. The ability to hold this complexity, complemented with a strong intent to take the
In the first few turns, Indranil actively names two ways in which he is aware of metaphor:
the role of metaphor in coming up with solutions in the embodied making method and the
specific metaphor of business as a landscape that we used to change the nature of the infinite
canvas to support business elements. Indranil also repeats that he does not see the hexagons
The metaphor BUSINESS IS A LANDSCAPE that shows the following structure in the
selected episode:
Further on, Indranil and I discuss the river of forces metaphor in relation to the business as
a landscape metaphor. The following metaphorical structure emerges from the transcript:
Business as a landscape ?
simply emerged
In the last section of the episode, I ask Indranil to share his conception of metaphor.
Indranil shares that he is aware of metaphor as something that can become embedded in
language through analogy, and analogy is illustrated by a story. By taking the analogy from a
story and extending the analogy in language, a metaphor comes to life. This conception of
metaphor is close to the generative theory of metaphor of Schn (1993, 2011), but it leaves
out the process of neural embodiment, phenomenal experience, and the cognitive
unconscious. Story is a concept that could be conceived of as holding this tacit dimension of
metaphor, but earlier in the design process, Indranil had marked stories as representations, so
I can assume he sees metaphors as representational even if they can come to life through their
embedding in language.
truth show up in his assessment that a hexagon is not metaphorical, that business as a
landscape just emerged, that the infinite canvas just sort of happened, and that our designer
took anchors from his tools and applied them to the canvas as anchors without metaphorical
meaning.
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Using our knowledge of neural embodiment, phenomenal experience, and the cognitive
unconscious, we could find that our use of the circle as experience, and as a metaphor for
Nietzsche's (1997) eternal recurrence, prefigured the shift from the canvas as a grid to the
canvas as a globe. Also, our earlier breakthrough, with the river metaphor entailing both the
man and the river changing in interaction, prefigured the idea that both you and a place on a
map would have changed by the time you revisit the place after having circumnavigated the
globe. However, for such assertions to become valid, I might need to analyze all data to
surface its conceptual metaphors for metaphors using conceptual metaphor analysis and then
engage in a number of psychological experiments that would show that the metaphors
surfaced from the conversations in our team are actually grounded in nonconscious behavior
that is coherent with the concepts-in-use. As there is no pragmatic reason for doing so in the
consider other ways to include this perspective in design practice. Two thoughts come to
mind.
The first is a reiteration of what I said above: to make the theory, research, and practice of
embodied realism, and Johnson's (2007) and others work on the embodiment, a much more
central and explicit tenet of what we are doing when we work with metaphors. The MMIIRR
model might help do just that. The second is to create practices that help us recognize how
metaphors work in that process, which contrasts with what Indranil said in that we go from a
and dead metaphors we have for important abstractions in our design work, and then probing
deeper to image schemas, feelings, emotions, and senses we have about abstractions in our
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able to increase our awareness for the embodied nature of metaphor across the whole
interactions are helpful for just that, but they might not be typed strongly enough along the
There are some improvisations with the business as a landscape metaphor. In the later
turns, we achieve coherence with applying the landmark metaphor to indicate the location of
products on the canvas of Business Elements. However, the generative capacity of the turns
is not that strong overall, possibly because we each have quite different conceptions of
In our conversation, there is some back and forth between the two sides of the metaphor
BUSINESS IS A LANDSCAPE. The turns around the concept of anchors are an example of
this. I saw the concept of anchor as coherent with the A COMPLEX PROCESS IS A RIVER
OF FORCES metaphor, which could be coherent with the landscape metaphor, but according
to Indranil, for our designer the concept of anchors to lock down elements on the canvas
derived from his experience with the Adobe suite of software products, which uses the
concept of anchors to mark points where shapes in that software can be manipulated in the
design space. To Indranil, therefore, the change of the term anchor to the term landmark
made sense because for orienting towards a product in a business that is displaced as a
landscape, a landmark makes more sense than an anchor, especially if Indranils conception
of anchor associates with a software feature where the metaphor of anchor is used in a
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different context where the rest of that metaphor is not entailed specifically26. Analyzing this
aspect of MMIIRR is quite complex because it is hard to derive directly from the data in
which ways parts of LANDSCAPE are seen as related to BUSINESS in landscape type ways.
The final episode is taken from my reflection with Andr. We reflect specifically about
the metaphor A PROCESS IS A RIVER OF FORCES and we wonder how the entailments of
that metaphor have changed shape in the design artifacts and in the method and the system
over the course of the process from beginning to end. We were looking at the artifact in
Figure 46. Andr's artifact for the design of an Embodied Making system.
26
In the Adobe suite of software products, anchors do generate some metaphorical coherence with
their source domain, but no other features complement that metaphor in a coherent way, so it is understandable
that Indranil did not see the analogy between how Adobe uses anchors and how we tried to use anchors.
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In this screenshot of the first bta of the embodied making system, Andr was the
designer, and he extended and persisted the river of forces metaphor's colors. Stories are
40. S: Mmmh.
41. A: So, we added, some of the metaphor really directly impacted the visual
elements.
42. S: As you created this one for example.
43. A: Yeah, that was the reason for the call actually. So that matches the metaphor
here. And you will only see it when you know it. But you see the forces look like
water.
44. S: Yeah, streaming around something, in this case a solution element, yeah.
45. A: But then that got lost because we didn't share the same metaphor with
[designer]. So he just sees colors and replaces it with something else.
Figure 48. Embodied Making bta version after redesign (Copyright Product Foundry).
Screenshot taken from embodied making on December 5, 2013. Reprinted with permission.
In the screenshot of the redesigned beta, the forces are now orange and the solutions are
blue. Our designer had switched colors. Andr assumes this is because we have not shared
Later, we reflect back on why the directionality of forces as seen in our river of forces
My river of forces design outcome above, created on December 2, 2011 in Figure 48, and
Andr's river of forces design outcome below were created on the same night in parallel. We
compared these two rivers the next day, and these formed a strong breakthrough on the path
to the system together. As is visible in the system, the directionality of forces relative to each
48. S: That was a very conscious decision I remember this. He, you pushed for this
pretty hard actually to keep it as generic as possible initially.
49. A: Yeah, and one of the problems is of course is that the directionality, still on the
canvas we didn't solve. We could say, stuff on the right means this and stuff on the
left means that. But we never played with it working out an example. To see how
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that really works you know. So again there is a risk because these originals
metaphor. If you lose them, then some of the ideas that you had with these
metaphors implicitly also get lost.
50. S: So, how, so with the arrows for example. Let's stick with that example for a
minute. Did you remember it because you saw this in this session now like oh
yeah, mmmh, we had these arrows? Or was this still in your mind.
51. A: No no, both the colors that I initially had, and the arrows is something I forgot
about. Because while we're making this product, we invite other people that didn't
share the same metaphor.
Again, I will use MMIIRR to reflect on this episode and see what emerges.
Process of Reflecting-in-Interaction
The process of reflecting-in-interaction with Andr was different from that with Indranil
in the sense that it kept focus on the system as it is today and metaphorical embodiments (and
disembodiments) of the metaphors from the past. In that sense, it was more of a reflection-
on-action with emergent implicit consequences for the future. It was not so driven by
urgency for a current problem as the dialogue with Indranil displayed. It seemed to surface
more lessons learned as well, and in that sense we could name this episode an example of
reflection-on-interaction.
OF FORCES. This is the central metaphor that gave rise to Embodied Making and is in the
heart of the method. The structure of the metaphor as it is conceptualized in the episode is
We did not share this metaphor with our new designer. He changed the forces to orange
and the solutions to blue. In an analysis for the fellowship with the CMM institute (Van
Middendorp, 2014), I followed my intimation that this might have happened because I used
red for forces and blue for solutions nonconsciously in a workshop with farmers in which our
new designer participated. My own reflection of why I mixed the colors is that FORCES
ARE RED and SOLUTIONS ARE BLUE are more natural metaphors if the river is not
In this episode, there seem to be no clear places where experience is taken literally. The
awareness of metaphor as metaphor runs throughout. Andr sees how difficult it is to keep a
metaphor alive across time and when changing team membership and implicitly concludes
that we should do more to keep the metaphor aware as metaphor in order to come to a more
coherent system.
In this case, our knowledge of the cognitive unconscious could help us understand how
the color switch happened. If we let go of the generative potential of the river of forces
metaphor, we start mixing colors. Research into that color switch might show that FORCES
ARE RED and SOLUTIONS ARE BLUE are more natural than those generated by the river
metaphor, especially if the river metaphor is not consciously used at the time of processing.
We can clearly see this going on. This episode is a good example of metaphor generation
The persistence of the generative metaphor reflected back on the stories in the initial
design. As stories reflect the problem setting, they include current ways of dealing with the
process we want to support or change. The forces then get to work and, in the river
solutions, emerge as islands in the streams. Stories, therefore, came to be presented in yellow
and solutions as brown. This indicated that solutions and stories are of a similar kind as they
both emerge from the river as structures of land. This in turn made us understand that
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solutions are stories too, which at the time of conception are set in the future, but if worked
out well will become new stories of how the process functions after they have been applied.
This circular relationship between stories and solutions over time became apparent to us as a
Three episodes from the case study were used to test the working of the MMIIRR model.
Together, these tests show how MMIIRR can be used to add structure to the reflections on
application of metaphor in the design process, and in the process of reflecting-in-action, has
potential to bring insights into the process that may otherwise not emerge. MMIIRR seems
helpful in increasing the awareness of designers regarding several aspects of metaphor in the
process of designing. As returning to the research team to validate this finding in this
MMIIRR, which takes us beyond the limits set for this dissertation.
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Summary
This study wondered how the metaphors that designers use in design conversations
become embodied in the systems that they are creating. Our systems need to be redesigned
to better cope with the complex and dynamic nature of the problems and challenges of our
current world. The problem is that designers are often unaware of the metaphors embodied
in the system that they are trying to change, nor are designers always aware of the potential
role of metaphors in generating the new system. Therefore, the question guiding this study
was, How do our joint improvisations with metaphors become embodied in the systems that
we are creating?
metaphor use, and the role of metaphors in design conversations. Secondly, systems were
framed as both process and outcome and were specified to mean IT systems in the scope of
this study.
We need to change our systems because our current ways of creating and using them are
stuck in unsustainable dualities. Examples that were mentioned to illustrate this were the IT
systems in organizations that fail in contrast with the major internet platforms that attract
billions of users, the freedom for the individual generated by those internet platforms in
contrast with the increased power for central organizations based on the data these platforms
generate about their users, and the popular fear for artificial intelligence and robotics in
In the literature review, systems design, metaphor theory, and the metaphor of
organizational improvisation were discussed to provide a context for the design of systems
The methods section provided action research as an approach and action inquiry as a
method and introduced the case of Embodied Making and Business Elements as the research
context. It outlined 23 steppings that were taken in six cycles of research activity discussed
1. The data gathered and identified as relevant for the metaphors embodied in Embodied
Making and Business Elements were enough to analyze the process of how they
became embodied from design conversations via design artifacts in the system.
2. The two reflection sessions on the river of forces metaphor with Indranil and Andr
provided enough data for answering the research question from the research team's
3. Action inquiry could keep guiding us through the complexity and the amount of the
data. It offered enough breadth and depth to cover the overall case study and to dive
deeper into the specific dynamics between personal, interactional, and organizational
levels.
4. If desired, specific findings could be analyzed in more detail later using more detailed
5. According to the research team, our improvisations with metaphors resulted in several
A RIVER OF FORCES) that became embodied in the system that we were creating
6. Even though we improvised with many differing metaphors in the process of creating
Embodied Making and Business Elements, in retrospect, only a few of those are
clearly emergent throughout the whole process as being embodied in the method and
the system. These are the forms and the metaphors that we consistently returned to at
7. Even though at least Indranil and I were well read in Embodied Realism when we
started the study, we still conceived of the meaning of metaphor in different ways.
These differences in our meaning making of metaphor did not prevent us from
8. The persistent improvisations with the river metaphor resulted in adaptations of the
theories, methods, and practices that were integrated into Embodied Making and
Business Elements.
9. The persistent improvisations with the river metaphor resulted in a method and a
system that are quite different from existing methods and systems. This supports the
idea that a generative metaphor has the potential to create IT systems that are quite
10. Even though we consciously tried to generate Embodied Making and Business
only became conscious in retrospect. In our own analysis, this occurred because we
were not consistently sharing the metaphor of the river with our new designer at the
time of this redesign. This supports the idea that the generative force of a metaphor
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may become nonconscious after a longer period of use by designers who take it for
granted (especially as they feel the task of embodying it in the system is done). Then,
when new people join the design team, other metaphors generate more force than the
11. In this specific case, I changed the color of the system myself at one point as well.
This might have reinforced our designers decision to persist his metaphor in the
redesign, and it only occurred to the design team in retrospect while reflecting on the
research question.
12. Reflective practice, as exercised in the context of this dissertation, increases the
capacity to notice such changes in the embodiment of metaphors into the system,
metaphors for the system, and to mitigate the effect of undesired metaphors on the
system.
13. Using NVivo to make a comprehensive analysis of the data worked well because it
created some level of control over the complexity and the amount of the data.
significantly influenced the form of the dissertation emerging from the process.
emerged as the central process around which the other concepts revolved. Metaphor
ontology was the most central concept that emerged from the analysis.
16. CMM could have been another way to achieve the same result, not as a topic for
17. Another way in which CMM was suggested as a topic by the comprehensive data
analysis was as data itself as CMM was one of the sources inspiring Embodied
18. The need for an ontology of metaphor emerged from the kenning that even though we
coherent enough concept of metaphor to do so, the design team had many questions
19. The concept of reflection-in-action is one way in which Schn has integrated his
views on the process of designing and the role of metaphor in that process.
20. Schns (1963/2011) displacement of concepts adds the complex and interactive
blending of both source and target domains to the literature, which in conceptual
21. Turbaynes (1971) metaphor to myth transformation theory adds to the literature the
critical perspective where we can wonder if we have the metaphor or if the metaphor
has us. This view, and the work emerging from it, add a richer vocabulary to
generative metaphor theory and conceptual metaphor theory than that which recent
22. Johnson's (2007) meaning of the body provides a vocabulary rooted in the philosophy
23. These generative, critical, and embodied theories of metaphor together have the
theories had been made to this point, and no model exists that adequately represents
24. A step-by-step reflexive application of the metaphor theories helps in finding forms
that better represent their entailments. The model emerging from that process is
26. Our intimation that concept A is B-like balances methodical rigor with mysterious
27. Guided by these structures of being, we are drawn to perceive our experience of this
28. If one of the two concepts (and/or concept makers) retains an awareness of metaphor
as metaphor, and of metaphor as both generative and embodied, the potential for
reflexive displacement emerges where both concepts evolve their meaning as a result
29. If only one of the two concept makers attains a conscious meta-metaphor awareness
in a situation of displacement, there are two options for action: revelation of the
Three episodes from the case study were used to test the working of the model. Together,
these tests show how MMIIRR can be used to add structure to the reflections on the research
question. Using MMIIRR to increase a practical understanding of metaphor and the process
of reflecting-in-action has potential to bring insights into the process that may be helpful in
return to the research team to validate this finding, I am left to speculate as to the further
applicability of MMIIRR, which takes us beyond the scope of the limits set for this specific
dissertation. I will make some suggestions for how to practically translate the entailments of
MMIIRR below.
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In retrospect, this study was an action research project up to and including stepping 10.
From stepping 11 onwards, the study changed in its approach to become more generally
interpretive and qualitative in nature. In order to discuss the quality and validity, I will use
the framework to assess the quality of action research offered by Bradbury and Reason
(2001) to discuss the quality of steppings 1-12 and Maxwell's (2005) validity criteria for
assess the quality of action research: the quality of participative-relational practices; the
usefulness and/or helpfulness of the practical outcomes; how different ways of knowing have
been drawn on or have resulted from the study; is the outcome significant; and has the
Participative-Relational Practices
In this study, I was an integral part of the team that designed the method and the system.
As partners in business, we each felt that the whole effort of designing the method and the
system was integral to our joint work. The relationships in the team that conducted the
actionable part of this study were strong and coherent until the point where I left the team.
Despite this strong coherence, there was always a difference between our project and my
PhD. At each step of the process of making this study where the requirements of the PhD
required a shared decision by my business partners, they quickly agreed with my suggestions
as they did not see issues with how specific research concerns (like recording data or
obtaining IRB approval) would be in the way of our jointly desired outcomes. Indranil and
Andr trusted me to take care of these issues and not allow them to get in the way of our
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project. In the transition period between the action research turn and the interpretive turn of
this study, my PhD did become an issue for us in a different way. The time I needed to work
on the PhD was perceived by my business partners as possibly in the way of further
developing our joint business. This tension was one factor in the decision to part ways.
Interestingly, and fortunately, this tension did not concern the development of Embodied
Making and Business Elements themselves. A while after our decision to part ways as
business partners, we got together to reflect on what had happened. We all valued our
relationship as persons above what we had made of the business situation, and we continue to
have cordial relationships today. Only a month before I wrote this, I was part of a session to
share practices of applying Embodied Making in practice, which was organized by Indranil,
marking the start of a new phase in the continued development of the method.
A test for the reflexive practicality of the outcomes of the action research is feedback from
research participants that confirms its useful, practical nature. In our data, we often reflected
on the question, Is this useful? At many points, Indranil, Andr, and myself answer yes
to this question. Also, when reflecting on the research process itself, we often said that it was
saw how missing turns of reflection and sharing made us miss important developments of the
method and system. Again, it is fair to say that the scholarly competence that I developed in
writing our project up as a dissertation is not directly useful to Indranil and Andr. But it is
also fair to say that, in the light of my own intentions, this outcome is also practical, as it now
affords me to continue producing knowledge in a scholarly way with more confidence and
competence.
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The conceptual-theoretical integrity of the study is strong to the extent that it reflexively
generation to make research participants see the world in a new way, which enables them to
generate something useful, different from existing structures that inhibit the obtainment of
valuable goals. The depth of this one case is valuable as it allowed us to choose from the
huge amount of data precisely those moments in our design process that we retrospectively
thought were most relevant to the question, and the data we found there was useful in our
reflections on the research question. There are no strong reasons to assume that others who
want to follow the practice we have developed here would run into very different situations,
and we hope that the depth of the case that we were willing to develop and share is useful for
those who want to use its outcomes to design their own solutions. Of course, the limits of
generalizing from one case, however deep and broad its data, are clear. Follow-up work
using the kennings of this study should remain open to the uniqueness of the case at hand, as
Another way to assess the plurality of knowing embodied in the study is by inquiring how
the research has extended our ways of knowing. I believe it is fair to say that the case studied
in this project has extended our way of knowing by integrating kennings from the different
steppings into an evolving practice for design. For this one case and its outcomes, at least, an
integration of knowledge on metaphor was achieved that is not presently available in the
literature. Ironically, with the exception of Johnson's (2007) work, the deeper integration was
made by going back to older sources in the literature. Both Schn's early work and
Turbayne's work provide a new understanding that not only makes the design work based on
213
metaphor more subtle, nuanced, and complex, but also helps us to address questions that
have been reposed to, and in, the more recent literature. For example, a critique of embodied
realism is that it is linear in its inference from source to target domain. Schn's (1963/2011)
which both source and target (in embodied realism terms) change as a result of their
interaction. It is only the directionality of intent and focus that makes us think the source was
applied to the target while nonconsciously our conception of the source remains changed as
well. The questions posed by the current linguists, like Steen, about online and deliberate
metaphor were addressed by Turbayne in a profound way in 1970. Some of the new ways of
knowing we could develop come from integration of older knowledge with newer
knowledge, much of which was found through referrals made by those involved in the
how it is relating to the researcher, the research, and the participants, and in how it relates to
what is desired to be known. Where some qualitative researchers warn against mixing
relationality as well as to their helpfulness in getting to answers to what the research team
wants to know or needs to learn. In using action inquiry as a guide in the early stages of the
project, and by laying out a research procedure for data gathering and analysis in cooperation
with the team and my committee, I think this was well addressed. By evaluating the method
and the techniques at each stepping of the process, and by adjusting, changing, or choosing
different ways to proceed in joint deliberation, we acted in the spirit of action research.
214
Nevertheless, it is also fair to say that, in retrospect, this study is no consistent example of
the full application of any of the methods used in the process. Action inquiry was used to
make sense of the personal, relational, and organizational levels of the data, but after
evaluation of the pilot study, and given the changing circumstances of our business
relationship, we concluded that a more inductive approach would be the best way to
continue. This did not mean that action inquiry was discarded as a method in the further
professional development of the team. I still use action inquiry to make sense of the
complexity of my world every day. It only means that artificial continuation of its techniques
was abandoned in the further development and documentation of this study. CMM and CMA
were used to the extent that they helped make sense of the constructive nature of our
different points in the study, we decided not to do full CMM and CMA analyses as they are
often done when one or both is the central method for a study. Later, in developing and
testing the MMIIRR model, CMA was used more in-depth because it was relevant in seeing
This continuous adaptive reflexive method switching, both in the level of detail-
application and between methods, could be considered inconsequent from the point of view
of the methods. But if we go to the level of operational technical performance, I think this
was done in a way that strengthens the plurality of knowing more than that it weakens it
because there was strong coherence in the epistemologies from which the different methods
used derive combined with a strong ethos for sticking with the action research approach and
Have we engaged in significant work? Yes, I believe we did. Even though the limitations
of having data from one case are obvious, the case itself was highly significant for us and
addresses issues that are relevant and significant beyond the case itself. On the surface,
design, design thinking, and the design of information systems are topics that are central to
today's life. We read about the consequences of the limits to current systems daily, and there
is good reason to believe that designing will remain a forefront topic for some time to come.
On a deeper level, the insights deriving from the epistemology of embodied realism shake
our worldview. Developing ways to apply these insights in practice to critically address
systems we no longer find valuable and developing new systems that embody its knowledge
is important to all of us. There will be many ways in which this knowledge will be, and
should be, developed. I hope that this case is significant as one broad and deep story of how
this could be done, and seeing other cases through what we have learned will be valuable for
others. I continue to find significance in what I am learning from this study and will continue
Enduring Consequences
Embodied Making has evolved beyond the scope of this research study in several ways.
Indranil and Andr have further developed both Embodied Making and Business Elements in
Product Foundry and are applying it in all consulting and software projects they are engaged
in. They have continued training new business partners and employees to apply it in their
client contexts and product development practices. In my own consulting practice, I have
developed Embodied Making further by integrating it into a train the trainer program in the
Greenhouse Sector where we have trained a team of operations managers to use Embodied
216
Making as a game for continuous improvement and self-steered problem solving for the
people doing the actual work in horticulture. I also have applied embodied making in two
long-term, systemic redesign projects in the Dutch Mental Health sector. As mentioned
people applying Embodied Making in complex projects. So despite the breakup of our
partnership, Embodied Making lives on and is used in the design of significant systems in
The Netherlands. I believe that the quality of this research project has been a factor in
helping this to continue, and I will work to further develop what we learned in this project in
the further development of CMM where I am a member of the board of directors as I write
this, and where there is a growing acknowledgement that CMM would benefit from a more
To assess the quality and validity of the second phase of the research study, which was
more interpretive and inductive in nature, I use Maxwell's framework for the validity of
research outcomes involves a pragmatic inquiry into the question, How could I be wrong?
Maxwell suggests that researcher bias and reactivity are the two generic validity threats to
qualitative research study conclusions. Researcher bias occurs because of the pre-existing
theories, experiences, and beliefs that a researcher brings to a study, and it manifests itself in
which data stand out to the researcher as relevant because of that. Reactivity occurs as a
result of the effect of the researcher's presence in the study situation and the way this
presence influences informants responses to research questions. Both bias and reactivity can
never be fully prevented, and in the case of action research, reactivity is a specific goal. For
both bias and reactivity, it is important to understand how I am biased and how my
217
participants were reactive to my own participation and to account for how that may have
Maxwell (2005) suggests several aspects of validity that qualitative researchers take into
account when testing the validity of their conclusions. These aspects are not intended as
magic charms to ward off the specter of being wrong but as guides for transparent reflection
on the processes and procedures of the research study. I will use Maxwells aspects to reflect
detailed, complete data about specific situations. It can prevent premature and generic
conclusions as the researcher has the possibility to understand more detailed nuances and a
chance to see variation of the same phenomena in different contexts. I have been fortunate to
be intensely involved in this study long-term. This might also have contributed to Indranil
and Andr reacting naturally to me as both a participant and a researcher, it may not have in
itself helped to address what I could call my participation bias. I could argue that by being so
intensely involved as both a co-owner of the business, as well as taking on the role of
research-lead, that my bias was not so much theory and experience driven but practice and
enmeshment driven. I do think the validity has increased since I decided to part ways with
Indranil and Andr as co-researchers as I have been able to distance myself from the desired
goals for practice and have taken a more distant view on the data from cycle B onwards.
Rich Data
Rich, detailed data that are as directly representative of the situation studied as
possible can also help increase the validity of conclusions. In the case of this study, I was
218
fortunate to be part of the practice process as a full partner. As a result, I had access to all
design conversations that we had recorded and to all design artifacts and outcomes. In
addition, I could use my own experience of having been present in these situations as data.
Interestingly, like above, being so enmeshed with the practice situation created the opposite:
too much rich data. The tactic of retrospective selection of data according to the
breakthroughs we identified in our own reflections helped to focus the amount of data to a
scope that was manageable. I feel we did not get lost in the data, and indeed often had the
possibility to increase the richness of the data by bringing in additional data around an event
we identified as relevant.
Respondent Validation
When we noted the color change as reported in Chapter 8 above, I was able to remember
my own experience of preparing the workshop with the farmers, and we could ask our new
designer about his own experience of deciding on the redesign decision. The answers to both
additional questions, combined with easy access to additional data, provided a different and
more valid kenning than when I had to work with the data available at the point of noticing
the change of metaphor. Also, when Indranil mentioned that our designer might have taken
the anchor metaphor consciously from the notion of anchors in his design tools, we were able
to follow-up with him and learn that he had meant to further develop the river metaphor.
Intervention
In this study, we created what could be named an intervention. The process of designing a
new method and a system that we also tried out and worked with in client assignments while
all the time reflecting and adjusting the outcomes for our own practice, as well as our
219
involvement in several roles in the project at the same time, ensures continuous intervention.
It created an abundance of reflexivity in the research (see also Chapter 3 for a discussion of
this issue). I believe we found ways to work with this that improved our practice while
Where we found strange outcomes, like in the color switch or the anchors, we pursued
them and, where possible, went back to the research participants, other colleagues, or the
literature. Several such boundary cases are discussed, and the coherence of the study, in as
far as present, may result from naming several of them while moving on with the flow of the
process thereafter.
Triangulation
In this study, data were gathered during a long period of time from diverse sources using
diverse methods. Both natural data (the design conversations), reflections (guided dialogue
to reflect on the process and to identify what data would become relevant), artifacts, design
outcomes, and contextual information were gathered from the context of the case study.
Quasi-Statistics
At certain points in this study, choices were made based on or influenced by quasi-
statistics. When deciding what to focus the further literature review on, both the research
question and the inductive analysis of the reflections using NVivo software were of influence
in the decision. The two content topics most often coded were chosen to further discuss.
Maxwell (2005) suggests that this does not in itself lend quantitative validity to a qualitative
220
study but argues that, where available, quantitative information can, and should, be taken into
account.
Comparison
Comparison is not a relevant criterion for discussing the validity of this specific study
because it draws data from a single case. There will be similarities that can be identified
between this study and other studies along specific dimensions of this study (i.e., studies that
report a systems design process, studies that use action research as an approach, studies that
use CMM as method), but these comparisons, I argue, are artificial and unnecessary to pursue
here.
Generalizability
Internal generalizability is concerned with how well the study represents its own case. In
other words, was there bias in the selection of research participants and/or data? I think that
the internal generalizability of the study is strong. All three designers were integral to the
data generation, the reflections, the discussion of study outcomes, and to the process. In the
later stages of the development of Embodied Making and Business Elements, more people
from our team were involved, and we verified outcomes with them when required. When we
could not answer a question we posed ourselves about what someone in the team had done,
we asked them about their decision making. The theory that was further developed in the
interpretive phase of the study is internally generalizable as well in the sense that it covers
the key concepts and questions remaining after the action research phase.
The external generalizability of the case is limited because we have only examined one in-
depth case. The our in the research question therefore is only answered to the extent of the
our in the research team. Also, I have not come across many colleagues in the field with
221
such a willingness to deep-dive into a process of design and scholarship with such a deeply
reflective attitude. As far as I know, this was a unique possibility, and I am thankful for what
Regarding the theoretical model developed from the return to the literature, I have no
reason to believe that this theory would not be of value to designers outside of our team, and
I am developing practices that integrate the model in Embodied Making that I will in-turn
test in practice, so I hope to find out first-hand how it interacts with the data emergent in
other cases.
There are three ways in which I can see the ideas developed in this dissertation to be
further applied to improve the theory, research and practice of designing systems:
theory and research. For example, we could use aspects of MMIIRR to increase
metaphor part of the contextual hierarchy and analyze the logical force of the
metaphors in conversation. Using CMM in such ways will add rigor to the
critical analysis of metaphor and will add more generative capacity to situations
cognitive unconscious; for example, past reality integration (PRI) (Bosch, 2000,
and behavior, and ways to reverse psychological defenses and experience old-
correlations between these concepts in the practice of PRI and the specific
language to practice this process. This can be done, for example, by developing
patterns that I evolved from those in practice (Barrett, 1998, 2012; Van
Middendorp, 2015).
I believe that the process and the outcomes of these explorations will increase our
capacity to generate the types of conversations, and the types of systems, that will help us
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