An Amplified Skeuomorph
I don’t know what it says about my aesthetic leanings, but I found this 1912 building far more interesting once the presumably temporary scaffolding went up than I ever had previously — so much so that I pulled over the car I was driving in order to take a few pictures. None of the resulting snapshots began to do justice to the elegance of the lattice, the way the newly enveloped structure suggested an architectural plan come to life.
The point of my noting this incident isn’t the construction or the photo but what happened when I hit the button on my phone to trigger the camera app to document the scene: the sound of the shutter filled the car. It would have been even louder had I not already rolled down the window to get a better view of the building, a large church on Turk Street here in San Francisco. Hearing the artificial shutter sound — a classic example of a digital skeuomorph, in which a software application mimics a vestigial design element of a formerly physical object — was confusing, to say the least. Played that loud in the car, it wasn’t even recognizable at first as a camera sound. The magnified noise was entirely out of scale with the succinct click that audibly confirms a photo has been shot. I took a few extra photos in order to, in turn, confirm my sense of what had occurred.
This incident was an unintended consequence of my phone being connected to the car via CarPlay, a service that mimics select iOS apps on a dashboard display. These versions of the apps are optimized, even restricted, given the use case. That is, they tend to emphasize voice input and to limit hands-on activity. Somehow, though, the rerouting of the phone’s shutter wasn’t taken into consideration in the process. Perhaps at some point in the future, an update to iOS or to CarPlay or to both will eliminate the car’s exaggerated echoing of the camera’s shutter. Which leaves a question lingering about whether we’ll even notice such a passing. The constant iterative updating of the devices and software tools we employ in our lives means that numerous changes, small and large, occur on an almost daily basis, generally without any ability on our part to roll back the clock, to contrast today with yesterday. The future keeps occurring. Only by documenting the details of the momentary present might we even begin to keep track, to make sense of it all.
