The above is the title of a piece I wrote a couple of months ago for a project at the Tate - Transforming the Artists Book.
I was prompted to look at it again with the news that Scott Forstall, head of iOS has been fired from Apple. He is the guy that presumably champions interface designs like this:
An unholy alliance of overstretched metaphor and vanilla XCode button design.
Set that against the Windows 8 UI:
I just wonder if Scott Forstall was sticking to his skeuomorphic guns, and Tim Cook saw where Windows 8 and Android were going and decided that Scott's path was a dead end?
Anyway, here's the article...
My
first job in what was then known as multimedia was for a design agency in 1991.
One of the early jobs we did was an internal multimedia brochure. This being
just after the 1980s the boss still drove an Aston Martin and wanted the
interface to look like the dashboard of his car. So that’s what we built. You
pressed buttons to go to various sections and the speedometer showed where you
were. Steering wheel, walnut dashboard, indicators – this interface was a
complete re-creation of the MD’s car. He loved it. Everyone else hated it.
Skip
forward 20 years, and we see a strange revival of this sort of design, that
includes the apparently unlikely participation of Apple. In iOS we see a shaky
wooden bookcase to contain all your iBooks, a facsimile of some sort of
notebook for Notes (complete with ripped edges to the pages) and a frankly
bizarre green baize look for the Game Center.
This
approach to interface design is known as skeuomorphism, or making one thing
resemble another. More simply expressed it could be seen as the use of metaphor
in design.
In
1991, the use of skeuomorphism was rife. Buttons lit up, had beveled edges and
depressed when you clicked them. Backgrounds were made to look like paper, wood
or glass. Aston Martin dashboards were still a rarity however. All of these
devices were designed to familiarize users with a new world of interaction.
Prior to the invention of “multimedia” driven by the use of software such as
Hypercard and Macromind Director, users interacted via command-line interfaces
or the early versions of Windows and Mac OS. How then to assist people in
navigating this new multi-dimensional world of content? The easiest way was to
appropriate devices people were familiar with and use them in interface design.
The
last 20 years have made us comfortable with multi-modal ways of navigating
content, and, for the born-digital generation, their ability to grasp
seemingly-complex interfaces comes with a very short learning curve. Why then
do software developers persist with this use of metaphor?
In
1997 we started to develop Turning the Pages – three-dimensional digital
facsimiles of normally rare and valuable books. We would film a curator turning
the pages of one of these books, use this footage as source material to develop
a millimeter-accurate three-dimensional model of the original and then code it
so that, when the users fingers swept across a touchscreen, the pages would
turn. It was so realistic that staff at the British Library once found an
elderly lady vainly swiping all the glass cases in the Treasures Gallery. She
had spent too long using Turning the Pages and thought none of the books were
real.
Why
did we do this? Why not present the pages, folio by folio, flat on the screen?
Our answer was that most books are about content. You buy them for the words on
the page. Some books are about the artefact itself – the beautifully bound and
the immaculately typeset. But some transcend the state of “book” and become
icons. There is no other Lindisfarne Gospels or Domesday Book, no substitutes
are possible. One of the earliest books we worked on was the Sherborne Missal,
which allegedly has more medieval miniature paintings than the whole National
Gallery. People wanted to engage physically with this object, to pick it up, to
turn the pages. Because of it’s value and fragility they were not allowed to.
Many very valuable books are now not even on display all the time. For six
months a year they are “rested” for light, stress on the spine or binding and
sub-optimal atmospheric conditions. So our attempt at digital facsimiles is a
deliberate response to the frustrated needs of museum and library visitors to experience
the original. We have been asked many times whether our software should be used
to display magazines or print books. I simply don’t see the value in this.
Continuing to use metaphor in this context seems a lazy approach to interface
design when the folio ceases to have any meaning other than as a container for
words that originated in a formless medium like Microsoft Word.
Why
then does the use of skeuomorphism still exist in design? I believe it is
because the wheel has turned full circle. We moved from a cartoonish use of
metaphor, to a brutal exclusion of the decorative, the beautiful and the
playful as espoused by usability experts such as Jakob Nielsen. The almost
universal adotion of such principles spoke of a lack of confidence in developers
for over a decade, but now, with a broader, more casual user base, increased
confidence, and an iterative approach to design that readily allows for change,
developers have re-discovered their playful side and introduced fun into a
visual world that had become too austere.
For
most books though, I think there remains a huge intellectual challenge to
re-imagine their form for a digital age. The Kindle edition remains a largely
slavish copy of the codex unbound. The first steps in a new direction have been
taken by Apple with their iBooks Author software, allowing books to change and
re-flow in portrait or landscape form, and for the ready inclusion of all sorts
of media.
But
of all the challengers for the re-imagining of the book interface, it might
just be that we see Microsoft as the unlikely champions of a new approach.
Their approach to the design of Windows 8 shows that they have been through a
rigorous rethink of what an interface might be like, and the result is modern,
pared down, triumphantly usable and surprisingly elegant. Were they to take
this approach to books, perhaps in conjunction with their relationship with
Nook, the results might give everyone a reason to denounce skeuomorphism for
good.
Except
maybe us.
