Fake for Real: Digital Trashcan

At the beginning of the digital era, several metaphors from the physical world were transferred to the digital environment in order to make, otherwise incomprehensible, technology understandable. The digital trashcan from the classic Mac OS is a well-known example. It’s just so much easier to drag your documents into the trashcan to delete, rather than having to enter some series of obscure commands to obtain the same result. But over time some of these metaphors have become so omnipresent that when we meet with the original physical product, it somehow feels like a derivative. Soon we will be transferring metaphors from the digital into the physical domain, in order to relate to what has become this otherwise incomprehensible environment. No?

From our Fake for Real series. See also: Digital Trashcan brought to Physical Office, Delete Key Eraser, Google mapping in Physical Space.