Nijntje's restaurant

Currently I've been listening a lot to a CD with tracks that tell the story of a particular female rabbit. If you happen to sync in my developmental zone, you probably know about this rabbit. Here name is Nijntje.


In one of the songs Nijntje is playing 'restaurant'. She puts on a paper hat, made of a news paper, and sings "Now I am the chef of Nijntje's restaurant".

From a certain age, children start to use physical objects as symbols, representing something else. The 'something else' can be a physical object, but it can also be some agreement, some fact, or a relation between objects. In the example above, there is a double-take as far as representational content is concerned: first, the newspaper is used as a stand-in for a real chef's hat. Second, putting on this chef's hat automatically signifies that Nijntje is now a chef. (In fact, there is a three-double take considering that Nijntje is implicitly representing a small child, where in fact she is a rabbit, or even mor factual: she doesn't exist at all). It is remarkable, if you come to think about it, how young children, in the age of 4+, are actually able to understand such subtle semantical relations.

There are several possible explanations to this representational capacity of young children (and adults, likewise). What I want to discuss here, however, is that regardless of the underlying mechanism, one sees that throughout development and over cultures human beings have a tremendous *need* to use physical objects as representational stand-ins, in going about their daily business. It is as if we couldn't achieve what we are achieving everyday, if we were not able to use physical stand-ins. Consider the effort Nijntje would have to display in convincing the other children that she is a chef in a restaurant, if she didn't have some physical object with which to symbolize this role in the game.

Adults still have the same need as children, although we have learned, in various ways, to strech our abilities of dealing without them. But at significant points we need physical stuff in order to help us pin down the ideas and concepts that flow in our mind. In my work as a teacher I couldn't explain anything without using practical examples, metaphors, pictures, schemata, and physical models. Our students learn that end-users of technology often have difficulty in using the technology precisely because the designer has not provided the user with obvious physical clues that reveal the underlying 'mental model' of the interaction. That is: if you don't have a clue about how to operate the machine, it is probably because there are no physical clues, that represent the functional possibilities and how to operate them. A good interface provides a natural mapping: the physical form of the interface 'maps' in a natural way to the functional effects each part of the interface will have. When designers want to explain to customers, or end-users, about the design they have in mind, and whether or not this satisfies the customers whishes and demands, it is also obligatory to make the design 'tangible', to physically represent your ideas, either in a scale-model or a good sketch.

All of this shows that human beings, even in adult life, always need a chef's hat in order to understand the restaurant-game...