Your phone's camera click is the ghost of a shutter that isn't there.
A skeuomorph is a design detail kept from an older version of an object after its purpose has gone: the camera click on a phone, the floppy-disk 'save' icon, the grille on an electric car. Greek temples did it too, carving in stone the beam-ends and pegs of earlier wooden buildings.
The word comes from the Greek skeuos, 'container or tool', and morphē, 'shape', and has been applied to objects since 1890. A skeuomorph keeps a feature that was necessary in the original but serves no practical purpose in the new version, except to make it familiar and recognisable. Clay pots have been made with pellets imitating the rivets of metal originals; glass syrup bottles have tiny useless handles recalling stoneware jugs; children's shoes have fake buckles over Velcro.
It is an ancient habit. When the Greeks moved from wooden to stone temples, the Doric order preserved wooden details in stone: triglyphs and guttae are thought to echo the carved ends of beams and the pegs that held them. Early cars were designed after horse-drawn carriages, and one oddity called the Horsey Horseless even had a wooden horse's head on the front so it wouldn't frighten real horses.
Computers are full of them. The desktop and its folders are metaphors from the office. Contact apps once looked like Rolodexes, calendars copied the binding of paper desk calendars, and music software mimics knobs and dials. Some are sounds: the shutter click, the crumpling paper when you delete a document, the synthetic engine noise of some electric cars. The floppy-disk icon lives on long after the floppy disk.
Designers argue about them. The usability expert Don Norman says skeuomorphs ease the move to new technology, giving comfort and making learning easier. Critics say they waste space, add visual noise and can misrepresent what a system is really doing. Apple, a heavy user under Steve Jobs, switched to flatter design with iOS 7 in 2013, after Jony Ive took on more of its software design, but the ghosts of old objects are still all over our screens.
Source: Wikipedia — Skeuomorph · Text summarised from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)
