I wonder how much material/effort is wasted in our civilization on the entirely non-functional ones that continue to be used, like tiny little cargo cults to the past, each adding a little friction within the engine of modern life, progress, and bettering our world.
Yes, but … some of these can be seen as removing the cognitive friction of relearning unimportant things every time their implementations evolve. Rigorous situational efficiency would be inefficient overall, because everyone would lose time to codeswitching.
Good point, but that can also be seen as simply moving some things that might be naïvely thought of as "non-functional" into a class of "not obviously so, but yes, functional". The same as with skeuomorphs that are used as social signals. So even being liberal in letting things into that class, there is very likely a residue of entirely non-functional skeuomorphs remaining, right? And, I wonder how much we collectively waste on it.
Perhaps more interesting, I wonder how that value changes over time in cultures. Is it ever a significant drag on older cultures after a while? Does it have secondary effects. Like if you are surrounded by skeuomorphs all the time, does it hamper some learning because the designs of most things aren't really making sense.
This is tricky for me to think about because I’m not sure what to count as “functional”. For example, is a cozy sense of familiarity and well-being functional? I could argue either side of that.
It seems obvious to me that these things are a drag on culture. But because it seems obvious, I wonder how much I’m missing – maybe I’m just taking too narrow a view of what’s a drag v. what looks like a drag but is actually adaptive.
But even so, some dynamics might be discernible in the mess. Such as... consider the set of skeuomorphs defended by the claim to function that they aid by minimizing some switching cost. That defense has something akin to a half-life, when there exists some set of transition steps that takes the design of the skeuomorph, imperceptibly at each step, toward some more efficient design. So indefinitely using the "minimizing switching costs" rationale as giving "function" wouldn't hold up in such cases. Then it seems reasonable to say that any costs which arise from not having moved such skeuomorphs along that path of imperceptible transitions in a timely fashion would be a indefensible waste if that was the skeuomorph's only claim to functionality.
