"Light Green Doesn't Mean Hydrology!": Toward a Visual-Rhetorical Framework for Interface Design

The utility of metaphor as a visual–rhetorical design framework has diminished dramatically, and continues to erode. Metaphor has two important limitations as it is commonly applied in interface design: (a) metaphors are indexical, pointing to physical artifacts that they represent, and (b) metaphors are static, that is, unwavering in their indexicality. Both assumptions are demonstrably flawed. In this article, I first critically examine metaphor’s limitations as a visual–rhetorical framework for designing, evaluating, and critiquing user interfaces. Next, I outline an alternate framework for visual rhetoric, that of genre ecologies, and discuss how it avoids some of the limitations of metaphor. Finally, I use an empirical study of computer users to illustrate the genre-ecology framework and contrast it with metaphor.