This is similar to other technological artifacts that exist in our modern media. Have you ever noticed that the "call" button on your phone uses an image of a old handset? Or that when you save a document, you usually click on a image of a floppy disk, which is a technology that is well over a decade out of date. What is interesting is that we are living in a time where most living people who use technology will understand these images as references to legacy equipment. But, the future is approaching, and more new users of technology will have never seen an example of these items. Here is a wikipedia article, and a name, for this phenomenon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skeuomorph
Where the QWERTY keyboard gets interesting is that unlike most skeumorphs – where there is a contemporary decorative element that represents a former functional requirement – the QWERTY keyboard actually has a functional design based on a former functional requirement.
This also bleeds into next week's blogging question on how to make your research understandable to people in the future. We are often not aware of how the things we use today will be understood in the future. Some references and ideas will be lost to time, but will sometimes still impact the future, but not in the way we expected or intended. It is interesting to step back and look at a thing or an idea, and ask "Why do we do it this way?". You can start a research project from that kind of thinking, and you might be surprised what you find.
Finally, I wanted to post a picture of the Dvorak layout in case anyone was interested in how it differs from QWERTY, so here it is:
Trust me, once you get used to it, it all makes sense.
Skeumorphism! I confess I had not heard of this term before, so thank you for introducing it to the blog! What a wacky and wonderful word. The term is particularly applicable to the world of information studies (particularly IS&D, C&T, KMD, and even others), where technological design and innovation is constantly changing! But it is truly odd that some symbols, like the floppy disk, are still being used for the action of saving a document...Reading about skeumorphs, I instantly thought of long gone sounds which are programmed into our devices - the shutter "click" of a digital camera, the vintage ringtone on a cellphone. These sounds don't have an particular association with usability, but still they are included (almost as a given), as if to assert some sort of nostalgic connection. The topic makes me think a lot about meaning creation, and how the meaning of an objects, a sound, an image, can change over time, and as such is not a static entity, but rather something on which community members must agree on. Thus, there is no inherent meaning to an object, but something we ascribe. This is not a new idea of course, but it is interesting that certain meanings become intimately linked with an object, even if the object itself is no longer used, but its "memory" is applied to current technologies.
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