Metaphors carry meaning over — meta- “across” + -phor “to carry, or bear.” Etymonline quotes Aristotle:

It is a great thing, indeed, to make a proper use of the poetical forms, as also of compounds and strange words. But the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in dissimilars. [Aristotle, “Poetics,” 1459a 3-8]

My question is: meaning of what specific kind?

This question of kinds of meaning goes directly to the heart of design, because the best designers, like artists, intuit more types and nuances and depths of meaning, and try to convey (carry, bear) these meanings between people and collectivities.

Some meaning is objective. It is cognitive and recognitive know-what. You can define an object over against what it is not, then analyze its construction to see what elements make it up, what relationships obtain among the elements and what ways the elements interact to make the object what it is. And objects need not be material. They may be conceptual, too. What makes an object an object is its definite form — what the entity is in opposition to what it is not. Objective knowledge is know-what.

Recognition of what a thing is requires intuition — a tacit know-what — occurring an instant before objectivity, making objective understanding possible. Designers are keenly concerned with this intuitive recognition. When it fails, and people are unable to grasp what a thing is, it causes anxiety, antipathy and disengagement.

This is one reason designers rely on metaphor to make complex new things seem like familiar old things. But, perhaps beyond popular consideration, metaphors carry even more consequential meanings than objective recognition, namely practical know-how and felt know-why.

And this is where knowledge ends for a great many people. Knowledge is objective comprehension. Everything else is subjective opinion or imagination or emotions, all insufficiently rational to deserve the status of knowledge.

Designers, however, know that some meaning is purely practical. We do not stop and define terms and assign language to what we encounter. Rather, we simply act in response. Are these responses natural instinct? Are they acquired habits? Designers don’t have to care. Whether something is natural or second-natural, the goal is naturalness — to remove the burden and distancing of verbalization, and allow people to intuitively interact with things, so they become transparent extensions of our own being. Polanyi called this kind of intuition tacit knowledge — and here it could be called tacit know-how.

Confusingly, words themselves are things that can become transparent extensions of being. Spontaneous fluency makes words extensions of the speaker or writer, bearing one’s being to listeners or readers. But when words must be used to understand other words — when translation or construal of meaning becomes necessary — the words lose transparency. Each use of words to understand words creates intuitive distance. Perhaps a metaphor can make what I mean here more immediate: Imagine using a robot arm to operate another robot arm to operate yet another robot arm. Such is the use of words to understand other words (or using concepts to understand other concepts) versus having an immediate intuitive grasp of the matter at hand. The anthropologist Clifford Geertz used the language of experience-near versus experience-distant to express this, which, ironically, does a wonderful job of making this concept itself experience-near. Experience-nearness is a quality of usable systems.

Further, and crucially, some designers also know that some of the most important meanings are felt value. It moves us emotionally. This is the sense of meaning intended when we say something is deeply meaningful to us. Let us follow Polanyi’s pattern by calling this kind of intuition tacit know-why.

Some theses.

Thesis 1: Conceptive givenness precedes and conditions objectivity. It is by conception that all units of construction are perceived and conceived.

Thesis 2: Conceptive givens are articulate articulations of a comprehensive sense of everything that differs among people, and that can even change over time for one person. The comprehensive sense of everything is what is expressed by metaphysics, but exists prior to metaphysical expression, and all belief, as faith. Faith predisposes a soul to intuit in some particular way.

Thesis 3: Metaphor is one vehicle for conceptive givenness. Other vehicles are story and symbol, including presentational and performative symbols.

Thesis 4: It is by conceptive givenness (conveyed by its various vehicles) that know-how and know-why are intuitively conveyed.

Thesis 4.1: Metaphor, and concept in general, is not only a cognitive aid to help users identify what a designed artifact is. It is the primary vehicle of practical and emotional engagement.

Thesis 5: Concept and system should be intentionally kept in congruent relation. Neither determines the other. They must each maintain their own respective wholeness (for concept, articulate gestalt and for system, logical-causal integrity), as well as their conceptive-systemic wholeness.

Thesis 6: The conceptive-systemic wholes requires correspondence of articulate gestalts with systematized units across scales, from the smallest to the largest.

Thesis 7: Concept cannot be deferred until after the construction of a system. For conceptive-systemic wholeness, concept and system must be developed together, each in response to the other.

All too often, objectivists (here meant as people whose understanding is limited to objective cognition) tend to believe systems do more than they can.

The systems theory concept of emergent properties is stretched to imply that all kinds of mysterious and unpredictable things might emerge — what, how and why meanings — even if the parts don’t seem to promise them in sum. The possibility gets carried over into expectation. Whether objectivist systematizers think it explicitly or assume it implicitly, they behave as if systematic construction alone is sufficient to get things to where they need to be. Whatever desired properties don’t emerge on their own can be added after the system is constructed. But first, there must be something to which these desired properties may be added. The metaphor is something like: You can’t ice a cake that hasn’t been baked.

The upshot is that systematic construction is the first order of business, and that conceptual meaning (conveyed by metaphor, story, model or other means) can come later. In my experience this is the wishful thinking of people who are impatient or anxious to show immediate progress to impatient bosses. They will claim to aspire to genuinely inspiring, intuitive products — because to say otherwise would feel weird — but in practice they are perfectly satisfied with something functionally adequate that can be figured out with a reasonable amount of effort. Barely good enough is good enough.

Design at its best aspires to more. Design pursues conceptive-systemic wholeness.

Design is humankind’s best hope for overcoming nihilism. It conceives and constructs worlds we naturally care about. And the design process itself induces exnihilism.