Hall 1
Justin Hall
Dr. Selzer King
English 5364
17 May 2016
The Icon as Agent of Renegotiating Meaning
Introduction
According to Lakoff and Johnson's theory of metaphor, we structure and conceptualize
our experiences metaphorically. They argue that metaphor is not constrained to a mere literary
trope, but rather that metaphor allows us to conceptualize and understand our experiences.
This metaphor systematicity of how we structure and organize our experiences in terms of
similarities directly influences the way we perceive, navigate, and interact with reality. This
study will draw from Rudolf Arnheim's theories of perceptual psychology to show how the
physiological act of seeing relates information about the kind of object being perceived.
In modern times, designers have made use of this perceptual cognition by creating
icons meant to communicate information. As Slack, Miller, and Doak argue, the authors of
these messages have the power to influence the meaning that is being communicated, and they
also argue that authors be aware of the contexts of not only the author and audience, but also
the context of the mediator(s) being used to communicate that message. According to the
articulation view of communication, these mediators can become a kind of intermediary author
that continually defines and renegotiates the meaning of the object being communicated
about. Using the International Symbol for Access and the Accessible Icon Project as artifacts,
this study will perform a metaphor analysis on a specific kind of visual metaphor, the icon, to
Hall 2
illustrate these theoretical concepts at work in an in vivo metaphor. Please note that this study
will mimic Lakoff and Johnson's method of putting a metaphor in all capital letters.
Context & Methods
This section will first situate this study within the existing bodies of scholarship for
metaphor analysis, visual perception and cognition, and communication theory in order to build
a theoretical framework through which to analyze, in the next section, the functions of visual
metaphors as demonstrated by the Accessible Icon Project. In this section, this study will:

review key concepts of Lakoff and Johnson's theory of metaphor

define the history of and establish visual images and icons as metaphors

define icons as what Lakoff and Johnson (2003) refer to as the CONDUIT metaphor and
argue that, while the icon as CONDUIT communicates via a seemingly passive,
transmission model of communication, it is in reality serving as a communicative agent
that is constantly renegotiating meaning (articulation model of communication).
Review of Lakoff & Johnson's metaphor theory
Lakoff and Johnson (2003) define metaphor as "understanding and experiencing one
kind of thing in terms of another" (5). While this may not seem to differ from a more
tropological theory of the metaphor, they argue that "our ordinary conceptual system, in terms
of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature" (3). In other words,
the way that we conceptualize the world governs not only intellectual functions, but also "what
we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people" (3). A critical
Hall 3
part of Lakoff and Johnson's theory of metaphor is the concept of metaphor systematicity.
Because the way we conceptualize the world is fundamentally metaphorical in nature, it follows
that our concepts themselves are metaphorical, our activities are metaphorically structured,
and the language that we use is metaphorically structured (5).
Here it is important to explore what implications this theory of metaphor has for our
direct experience of the physical, present moment. Even in this direct experience, we are
structuring the sensory information in terms of metaphorical concepts. For instance, spatial
metaphors allow us to conceptualize our orientation in relationship to other objects or beings.
However, as Lakoff and Johnson note, "one can do only so much with orientation. Our
experience of physical objects and substances provides a further basis for understanding—one
that goes beyond mere orientation" (25). By understanding our direct experiences in terms of
entities or substances, we are able to categorize, group, and quantify these experiences based
on how similar or dissimilar these experiences are to the categories that we have established
based on previous experiences. The method itself of organizing and structuring our experiences
is a metaphor which Lakoff and Johnson label as a CONTAINER metaphor. These similarities
between experiences allow us to put an experience in the category that it is most similar to.
Though this is just one linguistic example, the very language we use to describe this process of
understanding and processing our immediate experiences is an artifact that allows us to deduce
an understanding of the underlying metaphor system.
It is important to note here that Lakoff and Johnson provide a disclaimer about the
relationship between experience and metaphor: "In actuality we feel that no metaphor can ever
Hall 4
be comprehended or even adequately represented independently of its experiential basis" (19).
They argue that the metaphorical structuring of our experiences is only partial because, "if it
were total, one concept would actually be the other, not merely understood in terms of it" (13).
Therefore, they argue, as we see these same objects and substances recur over and over
throughout action after action, we "experience them as a gestalt, that is, the complex of
properties occurring together is more basic to our experience than their separate occurrence"
(71). This is how we begin to associate certain connotative elements such as feelings to objects
or experiences that do not inherently invoke those feelings or other connotative elements. For
example, if a child, whose father is a carpenter, has fond memories of working with his or her
father in a workshop, positive feelings will likely be invoked by the smell of freshly cut wood,
whereas another person, whom had never experienced that smell before, would not have the
same feelings invoked.
From linguistic to visual metaphor
Particularly crucial to this study is the way we conceptualize the visual information that
we "see." "See" is put in quotation marks here to emphasize that our concept of seeing is also
inherently metaphorical. In English, there are a number of idioms related to seeing. Lakoff and
Johnson provide several linguistic examples of the metaphor of UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING: "I
see what you're saying. It looks different from my point of view. What is your outlook on that? I
view it differently. Now I've got the whole picture" (48). These linguistic metaphors imply that
seeing is understanding, as Lakoff and Johnson's label suggests. According to Lakoff and
Johnson's theory of metaphor, the physiological act of seeing would be the ultimate root of this
Hall 5
metaphor. The concept of a gestalt (a German word that translates literally as shape or form,
but with the connotation of the form or shape as a whole) derives from a particular school of
German psychology that explored why people often perceive the whole as something greater
than the sum of its parts.
Rudolf Arnheim, a perceptual psychologist and late Professor Emeritus of the
Psychology of Art at Harvard University, drew from gestalt psychology to develop a highly
influential psychology of art. Specifically, he explored the cognitive psychology associated with
the perceptual act of seeing. He recognized that there was a fundamental dichotomy in popular
thought between thinking and seeing, and a review of what was known about perception,
especially about sight, led him to contest that generally held notion. In his words, this review
"made me realize that the remarkable mechanisms by which the senses understand the
environment are all but identical with the operations described by the psychology of thinking.
Inversely, there was much evidence that truly productive thinking in whatever area of cognition
takes place in the realm of imagery" (Arnhem, 1969, v). This seems to synthesize with Lakoff
and Johnson's theory of metaphor, though the "realm of imagery" that Arnheim describes
might be the metaphorical structuring of concepts that Lakoff and Johnson describe.
While Lakoff and Johnson provide an excellent discussion of the linguistic and
conceptual functionings of metaphor, Arnheim can help compliment the more physiological
part of this complex process of thinking and seeing. In regards to how the perceptual act of
seeing is related to the act of conceptualizing an experience, Arnheim (1969) explains that no
percept "ever refers to a unique, individual shape but rather to the kind of pattern of which the
Hall 6
percept consists" (28). The "kind of pattern" that Arnheim refers to is the same concept of
prototypical category that Lakoff and Johnson describe. Because we internally see the set of
qualities and past experiences associated with the object of our perception, Arnheim argues
that "there is, therefore, no difference in principle between percept and concept, quite in
keeping with the biological function of perception" (28). If the perception of an object did not
instruct about kinds of things, "organisms could not profit from experience" (28).
Moving from a physiological discussion back to a more conceptual discussion of
metaphor, the very act of perceiving an object is, as Lakoff and Johnson argue, an inherently
metaphorical act. Returning to Lakoff and Johnson's (2003) definition of metaphor,
"understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another" (5), Arnheim's
scholarship helps emphasize the experiencing portion in a physiological sense. So, if perceiving
an object is inherently metaphorical because of the way we organize and structure our
experiences into a coherent gestalt, then visual objects that are created for the express
purpose of communicating, like the seemingly inert icon, deserve to be examined and analyzed
in greater depth.
The icon: an agent of renegotiating meaning
Icons, rather than being a natural object that we perceive, are human-crafted artifacts
that are meant to serve as a communicative aid in our everyday lives. The creation of these
artifacts, then, are an inherently rhetorical act that uses a visual grammar rather than a
linguistic one. Arnheim (1969) argues that "every visual pattern—be it that of a painting, a
building, an ornament, a chair—can be considered a proposition which, more or less
Hall 7
successfully, makes a declaration about the nature of human existence" (296). Though related
to education in the visual arts, Arnheim (1966) claims in another work that "Visual education
must be based on the premise that every picture is a statement. The picture does not present
the object itself but a set of propositions about the object; or, if you prefer, it presents the
object as a set of propositions" (148). An issue inherent in defining an object is that, by using
certain words or visuals to depict that object, the other aspects of that object are being hidden.
Lakoff and Johnson also note that, while metaphors allow us to "focus on one aspect of a
concept," this same metaphorical concept can "keep us from focusing on other aspects of the
concept that are inconsistent with that metaphor" (10).
As Arnheim and Lakoff and Johnson's scholarship have helped to illuminate, the author
of these communicative artifacts, metaphors about the object of communication, has great
power in creating or influencing the perceived qualities and meaning of that object. As Slack,
Miller, and Doak (2006) argue, "that recognition requires attention to ethics grounded in an
understanding of how power works" (37). They argue that technical communicators should
begin to operate according to what they call the "articulation view of communication," which is
a view "characterized by concerns with the struggle to articulate and rearticulate meaning in
relations of power" (37). Rather than conceiving of communication as a binary between sender
and receiver, the articulation view of communication allows us to recognize that
communication is "an ongoing process of articulation constituted in (and constituting) the
relations of meaning and power operating in the entire context within which messages move"
(37). They note that this context includes not just the sociohistorical and experiential contexts
Hall 8
of the sender and receiver, but also of the mediator(s) as well. Importantly, they redefine
mediator as more than just the human author, but "as the channels (including media and
technologies) of transmission as well" (37).
According to Lakoff and Johnson's theory of metaphor, though, a visual icon is itself a
metaphor, and this metaphor communicates a set of qualities and characteristics about the
object that the icon depicts. Therefore, the icon itself is an intermediary author that continually
reshapes, redefines, and renegotiates the meaning of the depicted object. The icon, being itself
an intermediary author as Slack, Miller, and Doak (2006) argue, has the power to continually
define and renegotiate the way people conceptualize the object being depicted. Icons that are
pervasively used have an immense authorial power over the way people conceptualize the
object being depicted because we see this same set of proposed qualities "recur together over
and over in action after action as we go through our daily lives" (Lakoff and Johnson, 71), which
over time inundates our perceptions of that object because of its overwhelming recurrence
within our experiential gestalts. For example, an icon such as the Symbol for Access (see Fig. 1)
is so pervasive in our daily experiences that we may often not take notice of the icon's
presence.
Figure 1: The International Symbol for Access
Hall 9
This may imply that the qualities and propositions highlighted by that visual metaphor has very
deeply ingrained within our experiential gestalts those depicted qualities with the prototypical
category, or the way we conceptualize the identity of, persons with disabilities. Again, this icon
in particular has an immense authorial power to continually define and renegotiate the way
society metaphorically conceptualizes, and thus interacts with, persons with disabilities.
Artifact Analysis & Discussion
Specifically, this study will analyze the International Symbol for Access (ISA) and the Accessible
Icon Project's (AIP) proposed icon for accessibility to illustrate how visual metaphors constantly
define and renegotiate society's perception and conceptualization of persons with disability.
This study acknowledges that there is debate amongst disability studies experts as to whether
the AIP's icon promotes ableism or is problematic for other reasons, but these discussions are
outside of the scope of this study, which aims to show how visual metaphors, particularly icons,
visually communicate certain qualities about the objects they depict. However, future studies
may look at these issues more in-depth to either challenge or confirm the findings of this
analysis.
According to Sara Hendren (2016), who writes about the beginnings of the AIP as a
street art project in Boston, "we wanted this icon-action to be the occasion for asking questions
about disability and the built environment, in the largest sense. Who has access—physically,
yes, but moreover, to education, to meaningful citizenship, to political rights? Framing this
Hall 10
work as a street art campaign allowed it to live as a question, rather than a resolved
proposition " (Hendren, 2016).
Specifically, the AIP believed that the ISA design could be revised to promote a more
accurate and humanizing perception of persons with disability. Figure 2 shows the current ISA
design next to the Accessible Icon Project's AIP proposed icon to help conserve space for a
visual analysis of the two icons:
Figure 2 (Hendren, 2016)
Undoubtedly, the ISA, designed in the 1960s by Susanne Koefoed, has had profound and
historic provisions. However, the rectilinear style of the design, particularly the supposed arms
and legs of the person, could be interpreted to be depicting the chair rather than the person.
The round design of the head does imply that the arms and feet are part of the person rather
than the chair, though the position of the body is unnatural and seems contorted into a
restrained posture. Based purely on a visual analysis, the ISA icon is visually emphasizing the
qualities of physical restraint and a general passivity, which could imply an inability to
adequately function in society independently of assistance. The official ISA design, shown in
Hall 11
Figure 1, includes the blue rectangular background as part of its design; which, as Hendren
points out, "doesn’t show the organic body moving through space, like the rest of the standard
isotype icons you see in public space" (see Fig. 3).
Figure 3 (Hendren, 2016)
The blue rectangle around the ISA icon creates a literal container for the icon, but at the same
time creates a CONTAINER metaphor, which visually implies that persons with disabilities are
constrained within the spaces created for them and are incapable of either escaping these
spaces or functioning outside of them. Visually speaking, this CONTAINER metaphor could be
promoting these isolationist qualities throughout a person's experiential gestalt, which will
directly influence how this person might perceive and interact with a person with disability.
The new icon proposed by the Accessible Icon Project (see Figs. 2 and 3) attempts to
change the set of propositions about persons with disabilities that the current ISA design
promotes. As Hendren states about the AIP, the original project was a street art project that
was intended to provoke thought, create social awareness, and create a social space in which
Hall 12
these questions might be discussed. Though the AIP tried several different designs and
mediums for their initial street art project, "it ended up, in 2011, with a clear-backed square
sticker - this one, that would be transposed right on top of the original, to show the old image
and the new one simultaneously" (Hendren, 2016) (see Fig. 4):
Figure 4 (Hendren, 2016)
By juxtaposing these two images, the project made a powerful statement by challenging the
isolationist qualities implied by the ISA design. Rather than depicting the person as passive and
restrained, the AIP design illustrates a more organic human figure, putting less visual emphasis
on the chair, and the design also depicts the human body in motion. With the clear-backed
sticker, the design resists the isolationist implications of the CONTAINER metaphor enforced by
the blue backing of the ISA design. Even when the AIP icon is placed on a blue background, such
as in Figure 2, the implied motion in the design suggests that the depicted person not only has
the capability of functioning outside of the designated spaces created for "handicapped"
people, but that these persons with disabilities interact with and function in normal social
spaces on a daily, routine basis. While the "Reserved Parking" sign shown in Figure 4 is perhaps
Hall 13
the most common display of the icon for accessibility, Figure 5 shows the AIP icon's
metaphorical interaction with the surrounding spaces much more powerfully, here shown in
public transportation interacting with the same spaces occupied by persons without disability:
Figure 5 (Hendren, 2016)
Again, while there is debate amongst disability studies experts as to whether the AIP's icon
promotes ableism or is problematic for other reasons, these discussions are outside of the
scope of this study, which aims to show how visual metaphors, particularly icons, communicate
certain qualities about the objects they depict.
Conclusion
According to Lakoff and Johnson's theory of metaphor, we structure and conceptualize our
experiences metaphorically. They argue that metaphor is not constrained to a mere literary
trope, but rather that the metaphorical conceptualization of our experiences implies that
metaphor systematicity governs the way we perceive, navigate, and interact with reality. The
physiological act of seeing relates information about the kind of object being perceived, which
Hall 14
designers make use of by creating icons meant to communicate information. As Slack, Miller,
and Doak argue, the authors of these messages have the power to influence the meaning that
is being communicated, and they also argue that authors be aware of the contexts of not only
the author and audience, but also the context of the mediator(s) being used to communicate
that message. According to the articulation view of communication, these mediators can
become a kind of intermediary author that continually defines and renegotiates the meaning of
the object being communicated about. This study has performed a metaphor analysis on a
specific kind of visual metaphor, the icon for accessibility, to illustrate these theoretical
concepts at work in an in vivo metaphor.
Hall 15
References
Arnheim, R. (1969). Visual thinking. Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
Arnheim, R. (1966). The myth of the bleating lamb. In R. Arnheim, Toward a psychology of art
(pp. 136-150). Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press.
Hendren, S. (Feb. 2016). An icon is a verb: About the project. Retrieved from
http://accessibleicon.org/#an-icon-is-a-verb
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (2003). Metaphors we live by. Chicago, IL: The University of
Chicago Press.
Slack, J. D., Miller, D. J., & Doak, J. The technical communicator as author: Meaning, power,
authority. (2006). In J. B. Scott, B. Longo, & K. V. Wills (Eds.), Critical power tools:
Technical communication and cultural studies (pp. 25-46). Albany, NY: State University
of New York Press.