Mixing languages': image schema inspired designs for rural Africa

The concept of image-schematic metaphors, basic subconscious structures of the human mind, has been used by many researchers for conveying abstract information in user interfaces. Since they can be conveniently derived from the users' language, an open question is how metaphors differ between languages and, consequently, how to design for multilingual user groups. We explored this issue while designing capacity building tools for the estimation of energy consumption in rural Africa. We found that the majority of image-schematic metaphors are equivalent in Swahili and English and that metaphors deviating in one language complemented rather than contradicted the other metaphors.