Metaphors and Design 49 Inordertogaininsightintohowmetaphorsworkindifferentcultures,Lakoffand Johnson (1980) give the example of cultures where arguments are viewed in terms of war. ArgumentIsWar According to Lakoff and Johnson (1980), people in a culture that instantiates this metaphor understand, feel and act in argument as if physically in battle. In the culture, arguments are partially structured by the concept of war, such as attack, defend, shoot down, etc. This is a linguistic battle, of course, but the meaning is projectedfromthephysicalexperienceofbattle.If,incontrast,thereexistsaculture whereargumentsareviewedintermsofdance,theywillhaveadiscoursestructured in terms of various aspects of dancing. We can assume that people in this culture similarly understandandexperienceargumentintermsofdanceperformance.They live in a culture where in arguing no one wins or loses, and no one is attacking or defending. Our (human) thought processes are made up of metaphors in most part, and we act according to the way we imagine things, which can vary from culture to culture because metaphors are rooted in physical and cultural experiences (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). They can also vary within a culture, because no culture is entirely homogenous. Michel Polanyi (1966) has pointed out that “our message had left something behind that we could not tell, and its reception must rely on it that the person addressed will discover that which we have not been able communicate” (p. 6). This illustrates how there can be significant misunderstanding or gaps even in the same or similar cultures. In every culture, linguistic metaphors are tools for understanding and can be meaningful and true. But the embodied gap exists somewhere between different cultures and sub-cultures (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). The gap between designer and user is, in most cases, essentially a cultural gap. For example, in designing interactive systems for healthcare, cultural (or sub-cultural) gaps can be found in several places, for example between patients and doctors, between elderly people andcaregivers, and between carers and health professionals. We understand our physical experiences of the world, our spatial awareness, our bodily movement and the way we manipulate objects, through metaphors. In our everyday life, we spontaneously adopt a drooping posture when we come upon sadness in others or are ourselves living with depression. On the other hand, we adopt an erect posture when we feel positive emotional states. We sometime describe ourselves as ‘feeling up’or‘feeling down’ showing that we understand indefinitesubstanceintermsofdirectionalityrelativetogravity(LakoffandJohnson 1980).LakoffandJohnsonmentionthefactthat“wehavebodiesofthesortwehave andtheyfunctionas they do in our physical environment”(p. 14). ‘Argument is war’, spatialization and other metaphors take account of an embodiedpre-linguisticstructure of experiencethat motivatesconceptualmetaphor mapping, called an ‘image schema’ (Johnson 1987). According to Lakoff (1987), imageschemataaresimplestructuresthatconstantlyrecurinourbodilyexperience, formedfromourbodilyinteractions,fromlinguistic experience,andfromhistorical