Trash metaphors

Nika Simovich Fisher on the evolution of a familiar icon.

The Long Island City Courthouse is an odd place to think about trash, but that’s exactly what I did last June when I was summoned for jury duty. As I arrived, I decided to document my brief foray into the legal world by snapping a photo—first of the court’s exterior, and then of the entrance as I walked in. “Delete that photo! You can’t take pictures inside the courthouse” the security guard brusquely instructed. I obliged, assuming the matter was settled, but the guard continued, instructing me to navigate to my “Recently Deleted” folder. My face ID was required to unlock it. I tilted my phone inwards to brace for the potential onslaught of selfie outtakes and found the illicit, though otherwise unremarkable, snapshot of the court and deleted it from all devices.

The act of deleting things on computers is misleading. Interfaces tempt us to “throw things away,” but really we’re just moving data around, placing things in a holding folder until more permanent steps are taken. Even then, it’s often possible to retrieve content, especially if it was backed up to the cloud. In the case of the phone photos on iOS, the trash icon itself appears in the main photos folder once you tap on an image, but is replaced with the words “Delete” and “Recover” when in the “Recently Deleted” folder. The absence of the trash iconography at this final stage escalates the permanence of your decision; the gravity is communicated through direct language rather than a picture.

The trash icon is one of the many desktop metaphors set forth by the Apple Lisa in 1983. While this computer is widely regarded as a commercial flop, the advertisements for it centered around the concept that it was so advanced, you already knew how to use it. Case in point, an ad from Fortune magazine during that era reads, “If you can find a trash can, you can run a computer.”

Apple Lisa’s interface was designed by a team including Bill Atkinson, Roderick Perkins, Dan Smith Keller and Frank Ludolph in an iterative process beginning in 1979. The trash icon was originally called a wastebasket and it was a bitmapped drawing of an outdoor garbage can with the lid tipping off. Later on, the icon was renamed “trash” on the Macintosh interface, where it was drawn by Susan Kare in 1984. Microsoft would offer its own solution to this icon where it was called a “recycling bin” and was depicted as a white, indoor office container with green recycling arrows printed on it.

In the beginning of personal computing, these referential ideas were helpful in demystifying computing for the everyday user. Over the years, the Macintosh’s trash icon evolved from a pixelated outdoor receptacle, to a colored garbage bin reminiscent of something Oscar the Grouch might emerge from, to a sleek, netted office bin, and finally, to its current depiction as a flattened, lightweight cylinder—a hybrid form of an imagined digital bin with its physical counterpart. At present, my laptop’s trash currently has 93 files in it, none of which look like the folded up pieces of paper shown when the icon is “full.” 

Much of the conceptual groundwork for these design metaphors was laid in places like Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Center, and borrowed ad nauseam over the past three decades. Apple’s 1994 lawsuit against Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard claiming infringement over the “look and feel” of its graphical user interface was dismissed because the court declared that the desktop metaphor was an idea rather than a patentable expression of one, and that it wasn’t an original idea at that. 

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The first user interface is often credited to Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad, which he created as part of his PhD thesis at MIT in 1963. In Sketchpad, users sketch directly onto a computer screen using a “light pen” that allows them to position points of a drawing and then change them. There were also physical buttons that allowed users to move and erase. This interface was more abstract and used more personal touch to modify the screen than the desktop metaphors introduced years later.

Desktop metaphors are a long-standing motif of GUIs. As Wendy Hui Kyong Chun points out in her 2011 book, Programmed Visions: Software and Memory, computers are metaphors for metaphors in that they can transform any idea into another idea. They succeed and are so common because they provide a way to describe an ambiguous relation between what is “visible and invisible.” 

Being able to quite literally drag something into the trash was a novelty of the early days of desktop computing and helped build literacy around file management. Today, dragging files to the trash is less necessary because deletion is a basic aspect of working digitally. The trash icon itself is there if you look for it, but more often than not, you can throw things away quicker with a keyboard shortcut, right clicking and selecting, “Move to Trash” or by pressing down and hitting an ‘x,’ as is the case with apps on the iPhone. The metaphor persists without a single solution, and language helps bridge this gap, which will likely be the case as generative AI continues to expand.

In more recent times, other companies have ventured away from visual metaphors, too. Skeumorphism, the design technique that references real life counterparts in digital interfaces, was replaced by minimal flatness throughout the 2010s, and is now having a resurgence with neumorphic styles that use dropshadows and subtle textures to add depth without being so literal. As Terry Nguyen points out, the appeal of pre-iOS 6 design is that, “it represents a period when screens still felt foreign to us, and our visual literacy was dependent on explicit real world cues.” 

Google, who all through the 2010s used a memorable “paper” motif in its Material Design system, decided to abandon it last year. On the Material Design blog, they state that screens appear in more places in our lives and that users are demanding more expression, emotion, and control over their personal devices. A one-size fits all visual system like Apple Lisa’s is no longer necessary, because there is a base level of understanding of the possibilities of a digital workflow. The Susan Kare of the next generation will likely develop a series of instructions and patterns that can be customized and applied to technology without needing a corresponding illustration.

It’s almost as if we’re ready for a less centralized visual solution. While the concept of discarding digital things will likely continue, perhaps a more secure approach will allow users to pick and choose custom routes for removing their data. In the future, the court security guard might not know exactly where to find the folder with my criminal photo, and I might be the only one who knows how long the photo will last before it exists solely in my internal computing system. 🗑️