Transcending Mimesis

On my commute this evening, I stopped at a light and saw a car with faux-wood paneling. The funny thing is that it wasn't a 1970's Oldsmobuick driven by an old man with thick spectacles and a hat with earflaps, but a relatively recent model - a PT Cruiser. It was the goofiest thing I'd seen lately, risible yet confounding: why would they do that?

I expect that wood paneling on cars was done back in the early days: the automobile was a newfangled contraption, and adding wood paneling made it look more like the horse-drawn carriages that people of that time found more familiar and comforting. Though it was patently unnecessary, inefficient, and just plain bad design, I suppose it made the transition a bit more comfortable for consumers.

But it's just not needed anymore, and seems rather silly. I'm sure that I'm not the only person for whom the sight of wood paneling seems ridiculous. But before you snicker, take a look at your rims ... don't they look a lot like chrome-plated wagon wheels? Are those thick spokes even necessary anymore? Aren't they aerodynamically inefficient?

And for that matter, do they really need to look like wagon wheels? It's doubtful that anyone living today has ever had to travel by horse-drawn wagon, so I don't expect it has the same psychological effect as wood paneling, nor is it needed. It's a vestigial tail that evolution hasn't quite transcended.

This put me in mind of the design principles of the early Internet, back in the mid-nineties when the "population" of the Internet was doubling every six months ... which meant that 50% of your user base was brand-new to the Internet, and presumably found it to be a weird, unfamiliar, and scary place.

The design guidance to overcome this was to try to make Web sites mimetic of real-world interactions. The goal for an e-commerce site was to resemble a real-store experience to make users more comfortable with this newfangled way of shopping. Fortunately, the limitations of bandwidth and the primitive state of interactive animation at the time prevented this from being achieved.

I say "fortunately" because the store experience, while familiar, is anything but efficient. It involves a lot of time and effort that, in a real-world environment, doesn't seem as much a burden as it would in the virtual world of the computer. You don't mind a two-minute walk to the back of the store to get the items there, though on the Internet, spending two minutes scrolling through a labyrinth of 3D virtual aisles would be intolerable.

And as a result, consumers have come to accept and appreciate the unique qualities of the Web - it's new and different, not at all like the real-worked experience of shopping a store or finding a book in a library - and we accept that as a Good Thing. I don't think that anyone would have appreciated a cell phone with a rotary dial, no matter how much it mimed the "real" telephones of the time. (My guess is that "there's an app for that" - though it's probably not very popular.)

But at the same time, there are vestigial tails in the most modern of devices. A good example is the "bookshelf" on the iPod - in which material is displayed in a rack, just like "real" books. There are even animation effects when you turn the pages. But why should an e-book have pages? It's as unnecessary, inefficient, preposterous, and stupid as wood paneling on a car ... and yet, there it is.

So in the end, we still have a way to go toward transcending mimesis and accepting that technology is a thing unto itself, that doesn't need to mimic obsolete technologies, but which can happily "just be itself" and exploit the capabilities of the medium, with no regret for the passing of the old.