"Oh, you just click the TV?" The journey of a metaphor

I was having a discussion recently about icons. Specifically, about what you might call "the journey of a metaphor". By this I mean:

Icons start out being a metaphor for some offline activity.  For example, many applications use binoculars for find or search, and a magnifying glass for zoom (though some applications do it the other way around). It sort of makes sense - you can imagine using binoculars to search for something and a magnifying glass to make things look bigger. Contrariwise, you can point out that binoculars make things look bigger, whereas a detective uses a magnifying glass to search for clues. I recall being in a long meeting once that went round and round about whether the application we were then developing ought to use a magnifying glass or binoculars for search. It was one of those times when everyone states their own passionately-held opinion about which would be better, and then things can go no further as no-one has any data. I forget whichh icon we went for in the end, I just remember the pain....

Over time, some icons get to be the standard metaphor. Even if you felt strongly that, say, an icon of a bloodhound was far more redolent of "find" than binoculars, it would be eccentric to use such an icon, because users have got used to binoculars and are likely quickly to recognize the icon, regardless of its original merits as a metaphor. 

Similarly, it is pretty much de rigeur to use a supermarket shopping trolley (shopping cart in America) for your ...er...shopping cart, even if you sell goods that would be most unsuitable to put into a physical shopping trolley.

Once the association between the icon and the action is firm in people's minds, the original metaphor pretty much stops mattering. One example on the way to this is the ubiquitous floppy disc icon for Save.

Floppy discs are becoming pretty rare, but we are so used to that being theicon that it doesn't matter that we save to other devices these days. It could probably go on being the Save icon long after users are mostly people who have never used a real floppy disc.

Which leads me back to the conversation I was having. It was with a guy who does software training, and said that recently he had been pointing out a Save icon to someone. "Oh, you mean that TV?" they said. 

Comments

[Gabe]

Ceci n'est pas une pipe!

Magritte was on to this 79 years ago...

[Daghead]

omg. that is possibly the funniest thing ever

...I've thought about the floppy icon myself before... A check mark minus the "ABC" used for "spell check" would be better than a life saver