Needless struggle to achieve something irrelevant.
It wasn’t just furniture either. This excessive effort towards mimickry can be seen in everything from those years.
Art Noveaeu (1890’s and 1900’s) was the first era of craftsmanship. In an age when technology was lagging behind peoples’ motivations and efforts, crafstmen and designers overcompensated for their lack of manufacturing ability by completely going overboard on craft with their gouges and chisels. It was decorative embellishment, and it was in style because it was pretty much the only style.
Once manufacturing techniques caught up, this was fast abandoned and you saw beautiful work from Bauhaus start to happen followed by that of Modernism. Bent wood lamination techniques and new methods of producing maleable steel rod embraced the materials for what they liked to do and combined with plastics furniture design became much more sophisticated. The equivalent happened in architecture and appliances. Designers fell into a symbiotic relationship with the materials they were using, and everyone was happy.
So why, given this awesome new medium on which we can display anything, are designers still doing this sort of futile imitation in UI?
Why are we forcing this poor screen to look like a cork and metal? Sure it looks pleasant because Apple has good visual artists, but it's just unconvincing and out of place. There's no texture or depth. We're trying to make the screen be something it's just not. It's the wooden lillypads all over again.
Why are we pretending this phone has a flip-clock? Why does that other have a wall clock? Those were both great innovations 100+ years ago, but they're archaic and results of mechanic necessity. I understand here they're called "widgets" and they're supposed to be cute, but it's just lazy design. As a digital designer, you're no longer bound by mechanics. You have absolute power to make a clock look however you want. So why would you just copy what less fortunate designers did before you?
iOS' Notepad and iBooks is bad, too. I've always felt the "Marker Felt" typeface just looks like shit. Handwriting is something we resort to. It's not as legible as what computers can do. And page-flipping is, again, an invention of mechanic necessity no longer relevant.
The only argument I can come up with for this sort of design is it's easier to get consumers hooked on products that look familiar. It must be the nostalgia dollar. Regardless, I think it's waste of opportunity after waste of opportunity.
I think the difference between now and a century ago is we now have too much control rather than a lack of it. There are no limitations to design around anymore. Creativity comes from a challenge, so now it takes a different kind of thinking to be creative. I think we’re in another Art Noveaeu. An iNoveaeu, but this time designers are overwhelmed by possibilities so they slip back into what's already been designed.
I'm not saying it's all bad. Most UI design is not like this. But I do still see it regularly, and I really want it to stop.
Designers need to embrace screens as a new medium. We can display anything, so why are we mimicking what already is? It's an uninventive waste of effort. These physical things that are being emulated are all hacks for a desired effect. A pixel screen usually lets you skip the hack and get to the effect. Design things that play on what screens are good at. Contrast; sharp lines; vibrance. Screens are flat and smooth. They're the most dynamic and fast medium ever. Nothing like corkboards and wall clocks.
† Obviously I'm summarizing a lot for brevity and just showing a few famous examples to make my point clear