Hacking Your Brain with Metaphors

Metaphors are the foundation of understanding – a conceptual lens that highlights some details, and hides others. Whether you're trying to understand an idea, design an architecture, or communicate an idea to a member of your team, metaphors shape the fabric of our thoughts.

The side-effect of understanding the world one way, is it becomes extremely difficult to see the world another way. Blindspots are the areas of understanding that fall outside of our metaphorical lenses, the invisible world that doesn't “make sense”.

In this session, we'll do a deep dive into the nature of metaphors and blindspots, and you'll learn three new brain hacks that can help you shift between metaphorical paradigms on command. We'll also discuss some of the blindspots in our industry caused by the Technical Debt metaphor, and how you can force a paradigm shift in your organization to Flow-oriented systems thinking.

Learn to see the world with a whole new perspective by hacking your brain with metaphors!

About Arty Starr

Arty Starr has been a software engineer for 20+ years and is a researcher and pioneer of new theories of the developer's cognitive experience that help us recognize how developers' experiences are changing with AI. Her theories of developer momentum and troubleshooting help us see software development through an ecological lens, recognizing it as a living activity in motion and the living capacities of care and cognition that support this motion. Her aim is to bring heart, human-centric values, and agency to the craft of software development so we can build toward the type of world we want to live in. With richer perception and by recognizing what matters, we can light a path to a future of thriving habitats where humans and AI can collaborate well and thrive together.

Arty is the author of Idea Flow, a speaker, thought leader, and artist who loves mixing ideas across disciplines into a fusion of creativity to help make the world a better place through her projects.

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