Nobjectstalgia

[madbard]

Instagram makes digital photos look like faded, sepia-stained analog photos. Several apps on my iPad sport interfaces that mock physical objects. The Notes application looks like a leather binder. Address book on the iPad looks like an old-timey address book, and the regular computer version adopted the same look with OSX Lion. Valuable

Comments

[merle_]

Think about the standard UI for Finder: everything looks like a sheet of paper or a folder. Pretty much the same for Explorer, except file extensions can be given other icons, but the file folder image is still there. That's been that way since, I think, the earliest non-text GUIs.

Also, in the way ancient days of the web, people used background images that made it look like a spiral-bound notebook, sometimes even with some graininess to make it look like a page.

So I don't think this is a new trend.

[madbard]

True... sorta. Interface elements like folder-shaped icons serve as a useful metaphor: they help you understand how a filesystem works. (Obvious to us now, but now at the time of Mac OS 1.0.) And at worst, they're neutral, not impeding functionality.

On the other hand, the trends I'm talking about actively interfere with or degrade functionality with no gain in utility. The new look for OSX Lion Address Book isn't any clearer than its predecessor, and uses more screen space. And Instragram intentionally makes pristine photos worse, at least from the standpoint of functionality.

[merle_]

That's true. Office 2007 has this big bar of buttons, and Windows in general gets more glitzy but no more useful between versions. Maybe they're thinking that since most people have large screens set to high resolutions they need to fill up the screen more?

[madbard]

I think they (correctly) guess that people have screenspace and resources to spare, at least more than they used to. But I maintain that the primary motivation is the visual equivalent of comfort food.

[perich]

Good observation, and I like the tie-in to romanticism (especially since I just saw Arcadia, which is about that very trend).

To the nostalgia I'd also add wish fulfillment. People look at a notebook and say, "This is great, but it'd be neat it I could search through it faster, or guarantee the words in it were spelled right, or link from here to things I found memorable." So when an interface is invented that can do that (word processing, hypertext, etc), the designer makes it look like a notebook. The people who really wanted that from a notebook get that "ah-ha!" twinge and are pleased.

[theotherkira]

We learned in school to call things like this "remediation"--how new media look like old media, hence TV shows that were basically radio shows with visuals, documents that you'll never print that still have pages, etc.

Ted Nelson has an interesting video about this in relation to Word docs: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=En_2T7KH6RA.

But you're right, some of it is clearly deliberate, not just an inability to think outside the box.

[madbard]

I think we can separate as different phenomena simple lack of adaptation to new technologies (here I'm reminded of iPhone games that put a graphic tiny joystick in the corner, which is about as awful an interface idea as has been invented) and the relatively recent surge of pandering to interface/visual nostalgia.

I almost wish that Howard Roark were a) real and b) alive today just to see him make a surly rant about this on a blog.

[theotherkira]

I've been writing a lot lately about social apps, and my father asked me if Howard Roark and other AR characters would use apps. I said Francisco definitely would, but my father could not be persuaded.

[madbard]

Roark would have a Facebook account with no posts and just the default icon.

[fitfool]

I think there's nostalgia but it also appeals to the packrat in me. I love hanging onto all my old photographs even though they're in unwieldy boxes. The ones that are cracked and maybe ripped along the edges? I wish they weren't ripped but the aging of the physical photograph is also a reminder of how long something's been carted around. Some of these photos have been passed down through a couple of generations now. Or with making things look like a notebook... I love paper notebooks still. Any time I'm in a bookstore, I can't help fondling the blank books, looking for one with just the right combination of looks that appeal to me and tactile pleasure in texture. Thankfully I've stopped buying them and bringing them home since I already have a pile of blank books. I like writing in them but it bugs me too since I feel like I can't search them easily and they take up space when I'm done with them. I'm actually thinking of typing up the contents of some of my old journals so I can then get rid of the notebooks.

[madbard]

You might consider scanning them as well. It would preserve the "feel" and spatial layout of your original writing without taking up shelf space.

... I just realized that I'm part of the problem about which I posted.

[fitfool]

How are you part of the problem? I was thinking of taking digital photos as a quicker alternative to scanning them.

[alicelee]

I'm loving steampunk.