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asymmetrical in nonobvious ways. Even demonstrations are only of limited use
if you can't see the asymmetries for yourself.
In the course of her explanations my friend said things like “put your fin-
ger in the pocket”, “fold it back to make a boat”, and “make the legs skinnier”.
Making each of these metaphors refer to parts and aspects of the folded paper
always took considerable effort, even though it was always wholly evident in
retrospect. Much of my friend's job was to get me to look at my partly-folded
origami crane in the right way, so that certain parts and aspects would stand
out as units for me. She was teaching me the skill of seeing my paper
as
having
a pocket, a boat, or legs. Although I got better at this skill, it never stopped
taking work. The work only became more routine.
3.
The final example comes from my experience teaching people to program
computers. If you're comfortable in front of a computer terminal, it's easy to
teach the wrong things. You've got all kinds of theory, but theory doesn't help
someone who hasn't yet gotten the idea of being “in” the editor. So I sit the
student at the keyboard and tell them very concretely what to look at and what
to type. As they get comfortable, my instructions grow more abstract. For ex-
ample, I might say “Type open paren then ...”, only to see them type the letters
“open”and“paren”.InthatcaseIhavetopointoutwheretheparen-
thesis keys are. Later, though, I can say things like, “Let's define a function
called ...”. When they're learning to read code, I have to point out that there
are conventions about indentation that result in common types of code having
characteristic shapes. And I don't explain abstraction hierarchies until I explain
that two hunks of code that look alike are often good candidates for a common
abstraction.
As these examples illustrate, my prototype of representation is natural lan-
guage, whether as spoken utterances, written texts, or mental thoughts. In
each case, figuring out what in the situation the text was talking about took
work: creative improvisation, reference to artifacts, and interactions with oth-
ers. The work consisted in relating natural language to concrete situations:
identifying the things the words were mentioning, seeing materials under
metaphorical descriptions, and heuristically associating visual patterns with
verbalized technical abstractions. And the work required to make sense of “take
the middle of the three-way fork” or “put your finger in the pocket” or “de-
fine a function” might differ greatly in different settings or under different
conditions.
