You know like :
- LED Light bulbs are made to look like the old incandescent type
- Plastic table tops have a pattern to look like wood
- Volume knobs on modern day electronic gadgets to mimic old log resistors.
Skeuomorphism?
Well that was quick. Count on the Dope!
Mimesis?
(Brought to mind by the Big Bang episode where Sheldon teaches Leonard how to look like he knows football to blend in with Penny’s friends.)
Perfect, it’s interesting to discover there’s a word that precisely describes this.
My first thought was “retro”.
Mine too. That’s the usual marketing term over here.
“Art Deco, very nice.”
I read somewhere that the earliest horseless carriages still came with a buggy-whip holder placed same as on a horse carriage. Because it was a look that customers expected.
But some of these things are not just to ‘look’ like old stuff – they have to work like them, too.
For example, LED bulbs have to fit into the same light fixture sockets as incandescent bulbs did, and to project similar amounts of light. Making them similar is the easiest way to do so, and easiest for the customer.
Table tops generally have to fit with the rest of the furniture, if you want customers to buy them. And the rest probably has a wood-grain look.
The critical factor for volume knobs is the size of the fingers that will turn them. Just like keyboards or hotspots on smartphones – anything smaller than 1/2 inch or 1 cm square is too small to be hit reliably, so they are made much bigger than the electronics require – because the fingers require it.
It was 125 years ago that Louis H. Sullivan said “Form Follows Function”, but it’s still true today.
But there are also designs meant to mimic the look of glowing filaments and such which really is extra work just to make them look more as expected when looking straight at them. I wouldn’t be surprised to know that there are performance trade-offs in doing so.
A current example: electric vehicles often have a feature visually resembling a grille at the front because of customers’ expectations of what a car should look like.
Some older, smaller table lamps, the lampshade fit onto the bulb with a wire frame - which worked because most 40W or 60W bulbs were roughly the same size. So there’s a practical reason for some modern bulbs to retain the size and shape. Flat lollipop shaped LED bulbs seem to have appeared and disappeared quickly from the stores.
Similarly, you can buy light bulbs for your chandelier - shaped like candle flames, some even have the slight twist that a candle flame would have - and the LED versions look like the incandescent versions which imitated candles. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a functional working candle chandelier. It seems incredibly dangerous and time-consuming to manage, they only exist for swashbucklers to swing from.
Back in the day the name for “the guy with a ladder” was “lamplighter”.
Chandeliers usually were hung from a pulley rope and could be lowered to light the candles, as it was in the middle of the room. This gave swashbucklers the option of swing from the chandelier by jumping off the balcony, or cutting the rope so the whole thing fell on those chasing him. Phantoms in the opera just cut the rope.
An earlier version of the OP’s question comes to mind. I once took a tour of Hampton court; the original part of the palace was built by Cardinal Wolsley after a visit to Rome, so he wanted a stately home like the villas he saw there. However, English craftsmen could do woodwork but did not do plastering much in those days. So in one of the bigger halls, above the wood wainscoting, is what looks like plaster walls painted light blue, going up 20 feet or so. Since the wood has shrunk and cracked in the last 500 years, you can see that this is 2-foot-wide oak planks planed and painted to simulate plaster.
This is nothing new. Pillars in classical buildings are decorated to look like the original wood columns that originally held up much earlier buildings. Pillars themselves in some instances are decorative rather than functionally necessary. Arches used to be a practical means of construction, they have in the last century simply become technically unnecessary decorative embellishments. We’ve only recently gotten away from breaking up windows -especially residential ones - into smaller panes instead of large expanses of glass, to the point where the “panes” are created with decorative pieces on or between larger sheets of glass.
Form may follow function, but it also follows tradition; unless the designer aims for the shock value of dispensing with traditional forms.
And indeed, sci-fi illustrators (or TV or movie set designers) deliberately design things to defy the well-known forms of our own day, to make everything look “futuristic”. (Picture the Superman comics showing scenes from Krypton, where transportation was by overhead monorail trains, and buildings look like the Seattle Space Needle.)