The Onion reports on a forgotten Assyrian god revived to name a sports drink. Go Nisroch!
The Winged Victory of Samothrace - statue of Nike, now held in the Louvre
Perhaps the Nisroch article caught my eye because I work at an organisation whose:
- corporate logo features Nike, the Greek goddess of victory (and was created long before the sports-shoe company)
- HR/finance enterprise system is called Themis, after the Greek goddess associated with good counsel, proper custom, procedure and social order
- new CRM(ish) enterprise system is named for Isis, the Egyptian goddess of fertility, motherhood, magic and simplicity
Can you see a theme there?
Computer system administrators have a long history of naming their machines, networks and gadgets after gods, pop-culture figures, music composers… anything that comes in groups and provides a mental model, a metaphorical framework that helps people to organise their understanding of the analogue reality it describes.
For example, I know of one organisation that named its mailserver TARDIS and its webserver Metabelis — the webmaster was a Dr Who fan. (TARDIS is the name of the Doctor’s spaceship and Metabelis was an important planet in the Jon Pertwee storylines of the mid-1970s.)
Another enterprise named its webservers for birds — galah, budgie, parrot — and another used the names of Russian composers. If you could remember one name in a series, the theme of the series gave you a mnemonic for recalling the other names.
Another organisation named its array of proxy servers after Snow White’s seven dwarfs. This is a particularly effective example of ‘framing’: hearing the names of two or three machines, you immediately know that there should be seven in total, and with a bit of concentration you would be able to name them all. The reference to a well-known fairytale provides additional information that helps you understand the system’s size and shape.
We often don’t know or recognise the frameworks that affect our behavior and thinking. Frameworks can be a powerful tool for designers, information architects and writers. Understanding an end-user’s mental model of a task or situation can give the designer or IA clues about how to organise and present information. And the organising principle will, as often as not, be based on some kind of underlying cognitive framework.
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Suggested further reading:
- Indi Young’s how-t0 book: Mental Models: aligning design strategy with human behavior
- Donna Maurer’s presentation at Oz-IA (slides and audio) about George Lakoff’s work on categorisation — and how we regularly blur the boundaries between the categories we create
- Wikipedia article about cognitive linguist George Lakoff; his ideas about the relationship between the physical brain and the language of our metaphors are particularly relevant here
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Tags: indi young, ia, frameworks, mental models, categories, language
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