The Metaphor That Taught Me My Own Concept

I came into the metaphor assignment thinking it would be the easiest part of the course. You pick an image, you map it to your concept, done. Turns out that's exactly the wrong way to approach it.

My concept was community building. I sat with it for longer than I expected. Everything I tried felt like something I had read before —a garden, an ecosystem, a living organism. All technically correct. All completely flat.

I ended up with a city. Not because it was clever, but because it was the first image that actually matched what I kept seeing go wrong in real communities. Someone creates a group, adds people, and then nothing happens. The space exists. The members exist. But there's no infrastructure — no square where people meet accidentally, no pathways for newcomers to eventually become contributors, no shared agreements about how we treat each other here.

Aerial view of urban infrastructure - the physical systems that make a city function and allow people to connect.

Writing it out, I realised I understood my own concept better through the metaphor than through the definition I had written before it. That was genuinely unexpected.

Teodora said something during the course that I keep coming back to: a metaphor doesn't just illustrate a concept — it reveals it. It finds the language for something you already knew but couldn't yet say. The writing task forced me to commit to one frame and follow it through completely. No vague abstractions. Either the city worked or it didn't.

It did. And I think that's the most useful thing I took from this course — not a technique, but a habit: before I define a concept for a client or a brief, I'll try to find its metaphor first. If I can't, I probably don't understand it well enough yet.