Playing with Models 2

Fragments from imaginary dialogues

“What’s the essence of the chunking-down model?”

“Breaking down a problem into smaller pieces to make it more manageable?”

“The essence of the model is making smaller.

Depending on the nature of the problem, there’s two useful approaches:
– making the problem be smaller – structural
– making the problem appear smaller – representational“

“So breaking down the problem is the structural approach.”

“Yes.

As concerns the representational approach, you’re working with representations and representational-models [<link; medium read].

For instance, you can play with the object metaphoric-model, seeing the problem as an object.

This opens up several useful metaphoric-models:

The size model – enlarging/shrinking

You can mentally…
– shrink the problem, or
– enlarge yourself in relation to the problem.

The distance model – moving towards/away-from

You can mentally distance yourself from the problem, thus making it appear smaller.

The contrasting model

You can compare it with something much larger, thus achieving the same effect.”