Metaphors and Analogy

A metaphor is not just a figure of speech but a way we structure our thoughts. The market is moving away from being a market where the basic necessity or need of a product is enough. In today’s highly competitive market the use of metaphors in products is essential.

Creating metaphoric products can make users desire it. Based on a review of metaphor theory parallels are going to be drawn to three different areas of product design. In design management the metaphors can help to get all members of a team conscious what the product they are developing stands for. This is accomplished through totem building, drawing analogies. In the area of metaphoric use in products the issue is to make the user understand the meaning of the product. This is for a producer achieved by describing, expressing, exhorting, and identifying certain properties through the product with the help of metaphors. The user understanding the product is also the central in the creation of metaphoric products. A method is here presented that focuses on the early phases of the design process of new metaphoric products.

As an example of how metaphors can be used he takes a superior metaphor for the development of new car concepts at Honda in 1978. There “the theory of automobile evolution” got presented. What associations can rise from this metaphor? The metaphor rouse the question: If cars were living organisms how would they evolve? The conclusion the development team came up with was the slogan: “car-maximum, machine-minimum”. This was in contrast to the general trend of the time that sacrificed comfort in favour of appearance. The further development of the concept led to a car that was short (in length) and tall (in height). These properties made it cheaper, lighter and more comfortable. The result of the concept development was the urban car Honda City. This car inaugurated a new generation of “short and tall” cars in Japan instead of the styling trend that was long and low sedans.

As stressed earlier Nonaka arguments that the use of a metaphor in product development must also include an analogy. As an example he uses the development of a personal copier by Canon where a beer can was used as an analogy. To make the copier more reliable Canon decided that the copier drum that stood for 90 per cent of all the maintenance was going to be disposable. However this would imply a dramatic reduction of production cost of the drum.

When the development team discussed this problem over a beer, suddenly the idea of analyzing the production process of beer cans appeared. It would be excellent if this cheap production process could be used to produce the copier drum. Analogy did lead to the solution of the problem as the intermediate step between pure imagination and logical thinking.

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