Metaphors of intent

Current research in cognitive linguistics questions demonstrates that metaphor is pervasive in the understanding and communication of abstractions of all kinds. This has wide-ranging implications for how we describe actual and envisaged information artifacts. Although it is not machinery or mind or mathematics or matter, requirements engineering and design methods must take some metaphorical stance toward their subject matter. This paper investigates two types of fundamental metaphors that recur throughout requirements engineering: (1) reification of abstractions as material substances and containers; (2) spatialization of abstractions as locations, trajectories and spatial relations; and (3) anthropomorphisms, some of which have recently been codified by M. Jackson (2001) as problem frames.