The Language of Creativity

When tech developers are making new stuff they produce specs and diagrams, have conversations, and create white board drawings during meetings, all of which have names for components and descriptions of functionality. In order to make something new, developers need to create new words and metaphors to talk about the new artifact in order to get it from concept to work product. In general I'm interested in the way people communicate about technical concepts and the sociocultural process of development. This is an ethnographic survey of web-related technology developers with analysis using theory from cognitive linguistics; specifically, metaphor theory and conceptual blending. Half of my project is a video which is an edited form of several hour-long interviews with tech developers.