I love the word and the experience of skeuomorphism – when an inanimate object looks enough like a face that our brains say, “face” when they see it. Houses seem especially likely to me to exhibit skeuomorphism, though I just glanced at my refrigerator and saw a face in the shadows I’d never noticed. I laughed on a car ride recently at a particularly silly face made from the back of a large construction vehicle.
It’s a fact of our brains’ wiring that we are always seeking patterns we recognize. THat’s what makes skeuomorphism a universal human experience, since we are all pattern-seeking creatures.
What, then, about subtler patterns we seek to recognize. Without the alarm bell that rings “a face” in our heads, can we file a sense experience under an unrelated but similar pattern. For example, do we hear a flute and subconsciously think, “a bird!” Does a descending pitch slide make us think something is moving swiftly past us, with a Doppler effect? Certainly our brains think “the sun!” when we look at our digital displays in the middle of the night.
As a creator, it’s interesting to consider how we can create subtle skeuomorphism effects by mimicing deeply experienced human sensations. As a listener and viewer, it’s enlightening to discover where we’ve drawn conclusions without even realizing.