An "Embodied Mind" Pedagogy Based on Metaphor

Beyond the simplest acts of self-preservation, humans cannot think without metaphor. This uniquely human “trick of the mind” allows us to build a stable knowledge of the wider world and move about in it successfully. Metaphor is not only woven deeply into our language for everyday events, but indispensable to our deepest scientific theories.

“Embodied realism” is the philosophical position that places our metaphoric ability at the center of human cognition. In doing so, it recognizes metaphor’s limiting as well as liberating functions. Those metaphors that can be substantiated by empirical testing are “apt” while others, especially those that have fallen below the limen of consciousness, can lead us astray. Identifying, analyzing, and testing the aptness of our metaphors is a challenging task, but one that can provide great rewards.

In Sales: How we think of, and present our business offerings to others. How we help others re-appraise their needs.

In Problem-Solving: How we frame business problems, define challenges, and account for resources.

In Strategy: How we define our purposes and environments. How we assess risk, and approach uncertainty.

In Learning: How we can apply experience from one domain to understanding of another. How we can use practice to develop new habits and liberate our attention.

In theory: How we can replace our explanatory models.

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Anatomy of Metaphor (in progress)

Conventional metaphors: "old" So deeply embedded in our language that they often escape detection.

Conceptual metaphors: "new" Unconsciously suggested, but intentionally posed.

Source domain or vehicle and target domain or tenon

Inference patterns: necessary links between elements

Entailments: the sub-parts of the metaphor; on the source side.

Mappings: those elements of meaning of the source that are carried over to the target domain.  

Schemas: The barest inferential structures that cross over from source to target.

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A Metaphoric Process

Speech and writing samples

Identify metaphors

Derive entailments

Apply inferences

Adopt new metaphors: personal, literary and scientific

Mine for entailments and implications

Related papers:

http://inform.nu/Articles/Vol8/v8p075-086Kooh.pdf

This paper explores open source as a metaphor for e-learning. It builds the case that e-learning and open source movement are rooted in the constructivist movement and the constructivist  movement is itself rooted in the pragmatism and instrumentalism that pervades John Dewey’s

theories of understanding as applied to learning. As a result, it recommended that the use of open source as metaphor for e-learning be further explored in three areas: instructional practices, instructional platforms, and instructional philosophy. Keywords: Open Source, E-Learning, Metaphor, Learning Object, Constructivism

thinkers:

Synectics, William Godon and George Prince

Gordon emphasized the importance of "'metaphorical process' to make the familiar strange and the strange familiar". He expressed his central principle as: "Trust things that are alien, and alienate things that are trusted." This encourages, on the one hand, fundamental problem-analysis and, on the other hand, the alienation of the original problem through the creation of analogies. It is thus possible for new and surprising solutions to emerge.

As an invention tool, Synectics applied a technique called "springboarding" for getting creative beginning ideas. For the development of beginning ideas, the method incorporates brainstorming and deepens and widens it with metaphor; it also adds an important evaluation process for Idea Development, which takes embryonic new ideas that are attractive but not yet feasible and builds them into new courses of action which have the commitment of the people who will implement them.

Lateral Thinking by Edward de Bono

Current practices may reflect adequate solutions, but better ones may lie undiscovered.  The creative problem-solver can systematically challenge cliches and old-patterned ways of thinking to break through to new arrangements of the same elements. He offers a number of visual exercises. He also discusses application of analogy:

Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions

Transformational thinking requires the abandonment of old paradigms and adoption of new ones. The old and new paradigms are dualities, like figure-ground; one way of thinking is incompatible with another.

Stephen Pinker, The Stuff of Thought

Describes work of Herbert Simon and others on AI. He presents how one can solve problems by finding a different version, or “problem isomorph”. The example Pinker cites is the “Tower of Hanoi” which is isomorphic to another much more challenging word problem stated here:

Lev Vygotsky

Zone of proximal development" (ZPD) is Vygotsky’s term for the range of tasks that a child is in the process of learning to complete. The lower limit of ZPD is the level of skill reached by the child working independently (also referred to as the child’s actual developmental level). The upper limit is the level of potential skill that the child is able to reach with the assistance of a more capable instructor.

“Scaffolding” was coined by Bruner, but V. had the idea:  “Scaffolding”  is changing the level of support to suit the cognitive potential of the child. Over the course of a teaching session, a more skilled person adjusts the amount of guidance to fit the child’s potential level of performance. More support is offered when a child is having difficulty with a particular task and, over time, less support is provided as the child makes gains on the task. Ideally, scaffolding works to maintain the child’s potential level of development in the ZPD. An essential element to the ZPD and scaffolding is the acquisition of language. According to Vygotsky, language (and in particular, speech) is fundamental to children’s cognitive growth because language provides purpose and intention so that behaviors can be better understood.[22] Through the use of speech, children are able to communicate to and learn from others through dialogue, which is an important tool in the ZPD. In a dialogue, a child's unsystematic, disorganized, and spontaneous concepts are met with the more systematic, logical and rational concepts of the skilled helper.[23] Empirical research suggests that the benefits of scaffolding are not only useful during a task, but can extend beyond the immediate situation in order to influence future cognitive development. For instance, a recent study recorded verbal scaffolding between mothers and their 3- and 4-year-old children as they played together. Then, when the children were six years old, they underwent several measures of executive function, such as working memory and goal-directed play. The study found that the children’s working memory and language skills at six years of age were related to the amount of verbal scaffolding provided by mothers at age three. In particular, scaffolding was most effective when mothers provided explicit conceptual links during play.

PIVOTS

The child wishes to ride a horse but cannot, so he picks up a stick and stands astride of it, thus pretending he is riding a horse. The stick is a pivot. "Action according to rules begins to be determined by ideas, not by objects.... It is terribly difficult for a child to sever thought (the meaning of a word) from object. Play is a transitional stage in this direction. At that critical moment when a stick – i.e., an object – becomes a pivot for severing the meaning of horse from a real horse, one of the basic psychological structures determining the child’s relationship to reality is radically altered".

As children get older, their reliance on pivots such as sticks, dolls and other toys diminishes. They have internalized these pivots as imagination and abstract concepts through which they can understand the world. "The old adage that 'children’s play is imagination in action' can be reversed: we can say that imagination in adolescents and schoolchildren is play without action"

Jerome Bruner: On Knowing, Essays for the Left Hand

The “right hand”, dexter, is the the doer. The hand of reason and law. The “left hand”(“awkward” for some, but not for me) is the dreamer. The left hand is the way of knowing that comes through indirection, through myth and metaphor. It is characterized, (in the appreciation as well as the conduct ) of any creative act, as a surprise. The right hand is the tester against experience, the converger, the doubter-until-proven, the cinch.

Bruner’s pedagogy  (tracing a direct line from John Dewey) prefers the hypothetical to the expository, the discovery by the student over the  pronouncements of the teacher.

(1966) Bruner proposed three modes of representation: enactive representation (action-based), iconic representation (image-based), and symbolic representation (language-based). Rather than neatly delineated stages, the modes of representation are integrated and only loosely sequential as they "translate" into each other. Symbolic representation remains the ultimate mode, for it "is clearly the most mysterious of the three."

Bruner's theory suggests it is efficacious when faced with new material to follow a progression from enactive to iconic to symbolic representation; this holds true even for adult learners. A true instructional designer, Bruner's work also suggests that a learner (even of a very young age) is capable of learning any material so long as the instruction is organized appropriately, in sharp contrast to the beliefs of Piaget and other stage theorists.

'knowing how something is put together is worth a thousand facts about it.'

Following Lev Vygotsky the Russian theoretician of socio-cultural development, Bruner proposed that social interaction plays a fundamental role in the development of cognition in general and language in particular. He emphasized that children learn language in order to communicate, and, at the same time, they also learn the linguistic code. Meaningful language is acquired in the context of meaningful parent-infant interaction, learning “scaffolded” or supported by the child’s Language Acquisition Support System

Narrative theory of construction of reality: Actual Minds, Possible Worlds

Bruner’s 4 Hypotheses of Discovery Learning

1. Intellectual potency is the belief that patterns, or solutiomns, or explanations can be found.

2. Autonomous reward rather than extrinsic

3. Self-organization & integration with other mental contents

4. Conservation of memory. Self-construction of learnings facilitates organization, and thus, their later retrieval (ret. is the true challenge of memory)

"So I'm standing up here, pretty confident that I have knowledge in my head that I can impart to you. I have that knowledge nearby, not right at hand, but waiting for me, just beyond the next word I'm going to say. I know it'll be there when I reach for it, but I won't really have it or be able to share it until I say it.

So at every instant I'm making a decision about what word to use next..... this choosing work helps me develop a better understanding. You on the other hand as the audience listening to me have to accept what I say at face value, unaware of all the choices I might have been making. I am making all the choices, so I'm doing most of the work, and I’m getting rewarded for my effort”. I am reconnecting my neurons emerging from this with a stronger grip on my own knowledge. But what about you?

I’m organizing my knowledge. When I do so, I’m going to find it easier to retreive and use later.

If all you are doing is following me, you are not able to organize the thoughts. That’s why so often, after the lecture the speaker is energized and the audience is exhausted.

Scaffolding: WILLIAMS, HUANG AND BARGH, Yale 2009

It has long been a staple of psychological theory that early life experiences significantly shape the adult’s understanding of

and reactions to the social world. Here we consider how early concept development along with evolved motives operating

early in life can come to exert a passive, unconscious influence on the human adult’s higher-order goal pursuits,

judgments, and actions. In particular, we focus on concepts and goal structures specialized for interacting with the

physical environment (e.g., distance cues, temperature, cleanliness, and self-protection), which emerge early and

automatically as a natural part of human development and evolution. It is proposed that via the process of scaffolding,

these early sensorimotor experiences serve as the foundation for the later development of more abstract concepts and

goals. Experiments using priming methodologies reveal the extent to which these early concepts serve as the analogical

basis for more abstract psychological concepts, such that we come easily and naturally to speak of close relationships,

warm personalities, moral purity, and psychological pain.

Dewey’s Instrumentalism and Pragmatism

Reflex arc

Context-dependence

Social verification

Deeper still

Husserl, Edmund. “Perception, Spatiality, and the Body.” Trans. Richard Rojcewicz and André Schuwer. In The Essential Husserl. Ed. Donn Welton (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999).163-185.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. “The Spatiality of One’s Own Body and Motricity.” In Phenomenology of Perception. Trans. Donald A. Landes. New York: Routledge, 2012. 100-48.

Strauss, Erwin. “The Upright Posture.” In Phenomenological Psychology. New York: Garland Publishing, Inc., 1980. 137-65.

From a U of I course catalog:

There is a developing body of work on human cognition which suggests that human thought is grounded in physical experience and extended by means of idealized cognitive models and metaphoric projections. According to this theory, basic preconceptual experiences (or schema) provide the organizing principles for the construction of conceptual models. Examples include link schema (such as the umbilical cord, hand holding); container schema (we experience our bodies as having an in-out orientation); part-whole schema (we experience directly the relationships between our hands and the rest of the body);and source-path-goal schema (from earliest childhood, we move from one place to another to obtain desired objects). The human capacity to conceptualize allows us to project these structures and to use them to organize other aspects of our experience. To take a simple example, we conceptualize purposes in terms of the source-path-goal schema; this gives rise to systematic source-path-goal metaphors that we use in our thinking about purposes. We can therefore perceive our purposive efforts as going a long way toward our goal, conceptualize something or somebody that interferes with our purposes as an obstacle that gets in our way, and describe some of our failings in terms of being sidetracked.

Polya, How to Solve It

A treatise on mathematical hueristic  “What is the unknown, what are the data? What is the condition? Do you know a related problem?”Polya  finds analogy at the center of his method: “...we may consider ourselves lucky when we succeed in finding a simpler analogous problem.”

The Private Eye (Curriculum ) Project

Thumbnail sketch of the tools and process: The aim of The Private Eye is to bring out the gifted in everyone: to bring out the scientist, writer, artist, mathematician and social scientist. The Private Eye is built around the use of a jeweler's loupe, a series of questions, and everyday objects.  With the creation of The Private Eye, Kerry Ruef pioneered the use of jeweler's loupes in education.

The jeweler's loupe is a magical magnification tool, quite different from and superior to a hand lens in its use and effect. It helps strip a thing of its stereotyped image so that real discovery, real thinking can begin.

The second "magnification tool" is a pair of questions; as you loupe-look at your own fingerprint, or a piece of popcorn or a flower or a spider you'll ask these questions to evoke thinking by analogy, the main tool of the scientist, poet, visual artist, inventor, humorist, teacher, preacher, and more. These analogies, written (in the compressed form of metaphors and similes), become the bones-for-poems, essays, short stories - and become the foundation for hypothesizing, theorizing, for answering the question: "Why is it like that?"

Should we be Managing Media or Managing Attention?

As those charged with media creation, promulgation, and consumption of mediated messages for the enterprise, we have been preoccupied, quite understandably with the creation of those messages. Just like the operators of the coal-fired power stations of the recent past, we've gotten paid for what goes out over the wires, while the exhaust fumes were somebody else's (the atmosphere's) problem.

We've suffered a similar ecological blindness. We've been less concerned with the attention our messages receive than with just getting them out the door.

These two items are intimately related, as Herb Simon wrote in 1971, "In an information-rich world, the wealth of information means a dearth of something else: a scarcity of whatever it it is that information consumes. What information consumes is rather obvious: it consumes the attention of its recipients. Hence a wealth of information creates a poverty of attention and a need to allocate that attention efficiently among the overabundance of information sources that might consume it."

This is about more than audience measurement; more than units sold, units delivered, circulation, readership, and certainly, more than hits. It's not enough to say our message has been seen. 

Science purports to know what attention is, at least operationally, and can get at measuring it, at least in a lab setting. Science can measure its short- and long term effects to an extent. If subsequent behaviors are changed, we can infer the "learning" has taken place. We can observe certain neural changes that result from certain experience.   Science tells us that multi-tasking is a myth, and that human attention has inherent signal-processing limitations. Philosophy struggles with a deeper understanding of attention, one that digs into the nature of consciousness itself. 

Attention is narrow.

William James analogized attention as a spotlight, characterizing it's narrow reach, and the need for time to allow it's sweep to reveal the wider world beyond our foveal view. The "Spotlight" metaphor for attention: what does it "carry" well, and what does it "leave behind"?

ATTENTION IS A SPOTLIGHT
(Derivative of the metaphor: KNOWLEDGE IS LIGHT)

Entailments:
...is consciously directed by the user
...goes wherever the user wills
...and stays fixed as long as the user wishes
...reveals fully & immediately whatever it is fixed upon
...is of constant size/scope
...allows only for sequential exposure; one detail at a time
...sweeps over over a continuous and contiguous field
...reveals what is true
...as it leaves the rest in the dark.

It assumes that we attend (from L. for "to hold") wherever we wish, that it is a willed and deliberate act. But our attention can be "stolen" from us by a shiny or moving object at the periphery of the "beam" of our attention. Memory plays a part in our our knowledge as well; as a mental construction of the wider field, a kind of montage is built up over time and is registered as a different kind of knowledge elsewhere.

Attention is effortful.

Our subjective experience of attending is that it is partial, but also that it is effortful. It's work. Recent experimental work has found that attention appears to consume work energy in the same sense that muscular effort does. We can use up, for a time, our attentional energy budget. 

Attention is not always under internal control.

We also feel we can have our attention "stolen", against our will, as we drift through competing stimuli, arising either from the world, or from our screens. 

Attention is also variously cheap, expensive, disloyal, whimsical, habitual, revealing, blinding, and rewarding.

The deeper we dig into attention, the harder it is to understand it.

More on Tangibles and Design Thinking

Previously, I'd proposed :

"Common objects, either material or digital, could enhance individual recall and retention while capitalizing on the peer-learning effects of editing, idea production, and affiliation: examples might include mediated group reports, sticky-note assemblage/pastiche, posters, or physical models  such as soda straw constructs (see Gamestorming for more)."

I've since applied Gamestorming-inspired techniques in one public and several private facilitations, with groups of up to 30. I directed critical dialogue aimed at widening the scope of the discussion. We then employed Post-It (TM) notes to capture individual thoughts on a topic, then had interactive rearrangements, "dot" votes, and further re-arrangement of the ideas, resolving them into themes and initiatives for further study. Photographs of the final arrays of notes provided durable work-product and documentation.

It was clear that having ideas transferred onto sticky notes facilitates memory and organization of what might otherwise be an evanescent stream of words into "things" which members of a work group can all readily point to and mutually process. 

I've since been reviewing the literature on tangibles, growing out of the emerging (though still fuzzy) field of "Design Thinking", popularized by Indeo's Tim Brown. Looking in those quarters, I also ran across the very intriguing work of Barbara Tversky, et al, at Stanford. She has done a good deal of work on "tangible" work items, in the context of multi-disciplinary design and re-design by "horizontally" staffed teams. Some studies worked with foam models of ICT devices, while others utilized erasable plastic tiles representing formal business process icons. 

Here's the gist: (1) regardless of the application domain, people think better and design more effectively in live collaborations than when working only within their own minds; and (2) they work more effectively when their hands, not just their words, are in play. 

Tversky has explored several dimensions of design-process tanglibles, in a 2x2 model, from abstract to concrete, and low to high resolution. She theorizes that "radical breaks" in design/re-design are better facilitated by media from low res/concrete space, where only minor tweaks or metrical changes tend to result from play with highly mediated and precise models like those produced by CAD. The prototypes created and manipulated in the design sessions are either "scaffolds" or  "anchors". If one wishes to challenge "form", test dominant paradigms, or get breakthrough solutions, they need to apply "scaffolds", not "anchors" to do it. If the desire is indeed to merely fine-tune existing products or processes, the more literal and precise the shared media, the better.


In a further level of abstraction, Tversky has advanced a triad of variables to consider when staging design exercises: scoping (how the problem is initially presented and perceived), shared media (the tangible or intangible common objects of play) and behaviors (i.e., those directed toward the solution, the process or how the problem is stated). 

Tversky has also drawn on anthropological theory, applying the notions of "wayfinding" and "navigation", as they relate to primitive hunting strategies, to the search for design solutions. The former are exploratory movements driven by multiple sensory cues in the immediate environment while the latter are movements driven at a more abstracted, "map" level, either from celestial objects or referenced by the cardinal directions and landmarks positioned in Cartesian space. The former are "visceral" (twisty and opportunisitic), while the latter tend to be straight lines of movement, economizing travel (time and energy) betrween 2 known points. Thus, a problem-solving process that is less solution-focused and allowing for meanders and surprises is a "wayfinding" one. Behaviors that support "wayfinding" will be the more at play; where performers report more sensory data and indulge in more subjective observations. 

The first "universal carrier", back in the Pleistocene, was probably little more than a stick thrust through an animal skin. Metaphors are means of using one thing to carry another. Here's my pictogram for metaphor, which in Greek, literally means "to carry around*"

What's NOT here, and ought to be, is the role of metaphor, as it might apply to language and visuals as well as more concrete instantiations. If, as Lakoff and Johnson argue, metaphors are not linguistic tricks performed to amuse those on the passenger decks, but the engines of meaning that spin within the hull of our conceptual life. The work of JJ Gordon and his Synectics, first developed as an educational process in the 1960's is applicable here, I think. It had didactic applications and industrial ones as well. For the student, metaphor is a bridge from the known to the unknown, for the "educated", breaking free of old metaphors can be the means to re-invention. 

As Gordon put it elegantly:

" Most learning situations involving substantive material call for Making the Strange Familiar, whereas most situations that call for innovation, as in problem solving call for Making the Familar Strange"

In Synectics practicums, new design-practioners were led to "make the familiar strange" by forcing new metaphors in the place of old but no longer-conscious ones.  Synectics could help marry shared media with applied metaphorical thinking. They will be my next stop.

Notes and clips:

A terrific doctoral dissertation by Jonathan Edelman on DT, applied, is at

 https://stacks.stanford.edu/file/druid:ps394dy6131/%20Jonathan%20Edelman%20Electronic%20Dissertation,%20Understanding%20Radical%20Breaks-augmented.pdf

Notes on DT process (after Tim Brown) 

Define

Decide what issue you are trying to resolve.

Agree on who the audience is.

Prioritize this project in terms of urgency.

Determine what will make this project successful.

Establish a glossary of terms.

Research

Review the history of the issue; remember any existing obstacles.

Collect examples of other attempts to solve the same issue.

Note the project supporters, investors, and critics.

Talk to your end-users, that brings you the most fruitful ideas for later design.

Take into account thought leaders' opinions.

Ideation

Identify the needs and motivations of your end-users.

Generate as many ideas as possible to serve these identified needs.

Log your brainstorming session.

Do not judge or debate ideas.

During brainstorming, have one conversation at a time.

Prototype

Combine, expand, and refine ideas.

Create multiple drafts.

Seek feedback from a diverse group of people, include your end users.

Present a selection of ideas to the client.

Reserve judgement and maintain neutrality.

Create and present actual working prototype(s)

Choose

Review the objective.

Set aside emotion and ownership of ideas.

Avoid consensus thinking.

Remember: the most practical solution isn't always the best.

Select the powerful ideas.

Implement

Make task descriptions.

Plan tasks.

Determine resources.

Assign tasks.

Execute.

Deliver to client.

Learn

Gather feedback from the consumer.

Determine if the solution met its goals.

Discuss what could be improved.

Measure success; collect data.

Document.

Although design is always subject to personal taste, design thinkers share a common 

set of values that drive innovation: these values are mainly creativity, ambidextrous 

thinking,[5] teamwork, endUnderstand the problem deeply and empathically

….and from different perspectives

Model the problem

Generate solutions, also getting to tangibles ASAP

Stimulating Divergent Conversations

As mentioned, highly resolved, abstract media is associated with parametric 

adjustment.

(anchoring model)

Media that exhibits low levels of resolution and high levels of abstraction is associated 

with paradigmatic shifts.

(mutable model)

In order to understand these phenomena, we turn to contemporary findings in cognitive 

science and to an experiment of our own.

Andy Clark has pointed to research that indicates that certain kinds of thinking cannot 

occur unless subjects’ hands actually move (Clark 2008). Clark asserts that much of 

what we consider to be thinking happens in the hands as well as the mind. Clark’s 

research suggests that thinking doesn’t happen only in our heads but that “certain forms 

of human cognizing include inextricable tangles of feedback, feed-forward and feedaround loops: loops that promiscuously criss-cross the boundaries of brain, body and 

world” (cf. Clark 2008, p. 129f). In other words, the media itself has an effect on how 

and what design engineers can think.

Cognitive scientist Barbara Tversky has observed that when presented with rough 

sketches, experimental subjects engaged in what Tversky calls sketchy thinking 

(Tversky et al. 2003, 2006), or the ability to think conditionally, or roughly. Other work 

in cognitive science has investigated the fitness of representations. According to the 

Cognitive Fit theory, the way the problem is re-presented determines the thinking model 

applied (Agarwal et al. 1996; Vessey and Galletta 1991).

More effective design groups ask process questions and pose user scenarios

User scenarios differ from use cases in that the latter are generic assumptions about a 

class of users and don’t take into account specific circumstances of engagement. An 

example of a use case would be, “archeologists could use this.” The conversations of all 

teams with both stimuli contained numerous examples of use case. The conversations 

of teams who deviated from the norm also included numerous depictions of user 

scenarios. User scenarios tend to concern an actual user in a specific situation, often 

described with rich sensate detail. An example of a user scenario is, “This is so cool 

that people will want to use it doing anything. They’ll use it all the time. They’ll be going 

home and they’ll steal it from work…What’s in my counter top…”

Enactment

Enactment can be observed when team members act out the use of an object. This can 

occur by either pantomiming the action or using a proxy object like a water bottle or a 

cell phone to represent the object while enacting a scene in which the object is being 

used. Here again, we found numerous examples of enactment in teams that made 

paradigmatic shifts with CAD models.

Combining Metaphors (It’s Like X + Y)

It’s like X + Y involves combining two example metaphors, and seemed to occur in 

conjunction with enactment. When teams used single instances of metaphor to describe 

how a stimulus was thought to work, we observed that functional changes would be 

made to the model. However, when two metaphors were combined, we found that 

paradigmatic changes in the model occurred. For example, one team combined the 

metaphor of a scanner with the metaphor of a glove during an enactment and came up 

with a new notion that was a radical departure from the form of the device in the CAD 

rendering.

Experiencing Eureka Moments (Ahhh!)

BPM media-cascades are overwhelmingly weighted toward highly abstract and highly 

resolved media-models (Fig. 12). We were anxious to see if adding media-models with 

a different profile of abstraction and resolution would help solve the problem. IT was 

new ground for us, as we had been accustomed to dealing with physical products and 

services, and not used to translating user input into process models.

Role-Playing with LegosTM

Our early explorations into changing the media of BPM centered around the notion of 

getting process experts and domain experts to engage in role playing using LegoTM 

blocks to represent stakeholders and their places of work (Fig. 14). In respect to the 

media-models framework, this is a move away from high abstraction and high resolution 

(Fig. 13). While not as concrete as actual enactments, these mediated simulations 

encouraged players to gain empathy and insight with other players. We also found 

that the simulation was often cumbersome, encouraging a level of process detail that 

seemed unnecessary.

In another experiment, we enlisted a favorite media of design thinking practitioners, 

Post-It ®; Notes (Fig. 15). We found that Post-It ®; Notes served as an excellent 

memory aid for domain experts in recalling the steps of their processes. This type of 

media also provided an object that both the domain expert and the process expert could 

point to for clarification. One significant shortcoming to Post-It ®; Notes, we found, was 

that it failed to frame the elicited process in terms of BPM.

Systems Modeling Objects

In our next iteration, we made a set of acrylic blocks based on Systems Modeling 

Language (Odum 2004; Meadows 2008). Domain experts and process experts could 

use dry erase markers and write directly on the acrylic blocks (Fig. 16). Users reported 

that the pieces were gratifying to handle, and that it was easy to make changes in their 

renditions of their processes by sliding the pieces around the table. With respect to the 

media-models framework, tangible systems modeling objects constitute a move towards 

less resolution and less abstraction than traditional BPM media (Fig. 13).

Experimental subjects who had used TBPM elements had the benefits of a memory 

aid. However, they were able to frame their experience not simply as steps, as with 

Post-It ®; Notes, but as a process, which included an understanding of parallelism 

and alternatives, achieved by placing TBPM elements above one another. The final 

question, “Is there anything else you would like to add?” led to numerous adjustments 

and changes, including exceptions to the process they had not yet reported.

When we observed interactions between domain experts and process experts, we 

found the heightened level of involvement of both parties striking. Domain experts 

easily grasped fundamental BPM concepts, noting parallelism and alternatives in their 

processes. 

Models are important in the invention process.

What is the relative value of metaphor?

Synectics

Synectics is a way to approach creativity and problem-solving in a rational 

way. "Traditionally, the creative process has been considered after the fact... The 

Synectics study has attempted to research creative process in vivo, while it is going on." 

[4]

According to Gordon, Synectics research has three main assumptions:

The creative process can be described and taught;

Invention processes in arts and sciences are analogous and are driven by the 

same "psychic" processes;

Individual and group creativity are analogous.[5]

With these assumptions in mind, Synectics believes that people can be better at being 

creative if they understand how creativity works.

One important element in creativity is embracing the seemingly irrelevant. Emotion is 

emphasized over intellect and the irrational over the rational. Through understanding 

the emotional and irrational elements of a problem or idea, a group can be more 

successful at solving a problem.[6]

Prince emphasized the importance of creative behaviour in reducing inhibitions and 

releasing the inherent creativity of everyone. He and his colleagues developed specific 

practices and meeting structures which help people to ensure that their constructive 

intentions are experienced positively by one another. The use of the creative behaviour 

tools extends the application of Synectics to many situations beyond invention sessions 

(particularly constructive resolution of conflict).

Gordon emphasized the importance of "'metaphorical process' to make the familiar 

strange and the strange familiar". He expressed his central principle as: "Trust things 

that are alien, and alienate things that are trusted." This encourages, on the one hand, 

fundamental problem-analysis and, on the other hand, the alienation of the original 

problem through the creation of analogies. It is thus possible for new and surprising 

solutions to emerge.

As an invention tool, Synectics invented a technique called "springboarding" for 

getting creative beginning ideas. For the development of beginning ideas, the method 

incorporates brainstorming and deepens and widens it with metaphor; it also adds an 

important evaluation process for Idea Development, which takes embryonic new ideas 

that are attractive but not yet feasible and builds them into new courses of action which 

have the commitment of the people who will implement them.

Synectics is more demanding of the subject than brainstorming, as the steps involved 

mean that the process is more complicated and requires more time and effort.
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*
The English metaphor derives from the 16th-century Old French métaphore, which comes from the Latin metaphora, "carrying over", in turn from the Greek μεταφορά (metaphorá), "transfer",^[2] from μεταφέρω (metapherō), "to carry over", "to transfer"^[3] and that from μετά (meta), "between"^[4] + φέρω (pherō), "to bear", "to carry".^[5]
Runners:
Media for group idea-play and communication.
Metaphorical Media
Place memory and invention

Visualization of abstract material

Tactile and gestural impacts on learning and retention