User:Marie Wocher/Annotation Interfacing by material metaphors

Interfacing by material metaphors Marianne van den Boomen

On a user interface, Marianne van den Boomen distinguishes between tools and products. Van den Boomen defines products as mutable data objects (files) and tools as executable sets of commands (programs) or interfacial signs (icons, buttons, menus)

The use of the computer is accessible for everyone because it became so easy to understand. It is so easy because the user interface is full of metaphors like menu, home and window. We use these metaphors without knowing what technical process these metaphors imply. For the user it doesn't matter if the metaphor is a tool or a product. This is why metaphor and product often is mixed up by the user. Van den Boomen gives the example of a coffee machine: We would never mix up the button on a coffee machine that shows coffee or Cappuccino with the actual coffee. But in the computer praxis it is quite common to mistake the button for the product itself because in our daily use of the computer we do not make a difference between tools and products. Actually, you can not have the product without the tool. It is not possible to read a text without a word-processor program or to read our mail, without a mail program. The mail program works as a tool, it is the progromm, giving the user access the his mails. The tool is a metaphorical translation of of machine code into human code.

This is also how icons work: Icons are specific software commands that are humanized. The machine actions becoming invisable wherever possible. In this case, the Mail Icon refers to a specific program or a place (mailbox), but for the user it refers to his mails, that he wants to read. The complexity of an icon is hidden for the user, the symbol only refers to a result. The mail icon hides the process it refers to, namely executing the mail program, including the configurations for a particular Internet connection, a particular mail account, and particular in- and outcoming mail server located at an internet service provider. Van den Boomen calls this act of deliberate conceiling: Depresentation. "The computer icon do their work by representing an ontologized stable state, while depresenting the procedural complexity"(p. 156 ) Because of this depresentation it happens, that the user takes the icon literally.

Signs, iconicity and indexicality

Van den Boomen refers to Charles Sanders Peirce, who has "enables a non-essentialist analysis of the relation between signs and the world outside language and signs". She points out that a sign can have three basic relations to the object it refers to: iconic, indexical and symbolic.

The index refers to the object it is presenting. For example, smoke indicates fire and a fingerprint indicates a person.

The symbol refers to an arbitrary object. The connection between the symbol and the object is characterized by habit, convention or law. For example the logo of a company or the flag for a country.

The icon refers to its object because the icon and the object are similar, analog or resembling. For example the portrait of a person or the map of a country.

Peirce's definition say, that the mail icon is an icon, if require that an e-mail is put on the same level as the postal mail. The icon is similar to its object: an envelope.

Tools ready-to-hand and present-at-hand

How can signs become tools?

signs are marks able to qualify, refer to, represent other signs and things tools are things in the world, that are able to shape and transform other things.

Van den Boomen refers to Heidegger, who says that tools exist "Um-zu" We don't think abou the independence of a tool, it only exist Um-zu. It exists to make other things work (ready-to-hand). A tool only becomes an independent object, when it breakes down (ready-to-hand)(present-at-hand).

Analyzing the mailbox icon as a metaphor conceptual metaphor: e-mail is postal mail

If you compare the postal mail with e-mail, the most elements match well.

mailbox > inbox of mail program

letter, packets > messages, attachments

sending and receiving > send or get mail button

sorting, disposing > distribution to folders, deleting

postal distribution system > mail-server network at ISPs

delivery by postman > consulting a mail server; fetch mail command

The last two entities doesn' t match and this is what Van den Boomen calls depresented. It is the procedure that is hidden from the iconic metaphor. On the level of an interface the e-mail icon is connected to the postal mail. The user gets the conceptual metaphor. "but it ignores the connections of software and machinery. It explains the human code, but not the machine code" (p. 260)