In a short piece in Wired Clive Thompson laments the persistence of skeuomorphs in digital design. He uses that word, achingly classical, to describe the way software applications often depict analog objects to describe digital functions. He is thinking of the way our calculator app looks like a handheld battery-operated calculator, our calendar app looks like a sheet-a-day calendar, and our note-taking app looks like a legal pad, with yellow lined sheets, brown binding, and ragged tendrils of paper along the top edge. Thompson argues that clinging to skeuomorphs, which can initially facilitate communication, ultimately holds back innovation in digital design.
I don’t mind skeuomorphs because they’re relatively superficial, and leave plenty of room for innovation and improvement. As people become more familiar with their devices and applications, they ultimately migrate to apps with fewer graphic distractions. That’s one reason Google is the leading search engine; it’s mostly-white landing page presents little graphic noise – no skeuomorphs here – to wade through. But skeuomorphs sadden me because they highlight the loss of pungent physical realities. My digital phone is set to ring like a conventional telephone, but this sound doesn’t bring back the weight of a traditional handset, the important feeling of picking it up when it rang and setting it down when a conversation ended, and the way one could get tangled up in the cord during a lengthy call and accidentally pull out the wall jack. We’re losing the physical memory of all kinds of ordinary objects to our smartphones and tablets: books, journals, scrapbooks, notes, letters, photographs, calculators, alarm clocks, business cards, radios, televisions. Do we remember what it was like to refold a blanket-sized road map so that our destination sat right at the center of it, to align photos in an album with cellophane corners, to cry into the pages of a diary? We carry fewer tactile memories with us and more images and messages. Before experience reaches us physically, we turn it into information.
