Skin-Deep Human-Centered Design
Beware of Icons in Skeuomorphic Sheep's Clothing.
Summary
In the face of Airbnb’s redesign, we introduce the concept of skeuo-pastiche, which better captures what the rebrand is after. Skeuo-pastiche is design that mimics the styles of the past to evoke a sense of function, while feigning care and ethics to encourage user engagement. Through this lens, we interrogate Jony Ives’s emerging public position as a designer and lead of io.
Function through Design
To ensure alignment with the ever-expanding quest for greater profit maximization, Airbnb’s Summer 2025 release brings to the table a full rebrand of the app, complete with a highly contentious and semiotically textured “Explore” tab.
The “Explore” tab’s icons produced heterogeneous responses from design stakeholders. Some calls expressed concern about the design direction, while others deeply resonated with the perceived change in brand identity.
Digital platforms have pushed towards conformity—minimalism; all of this has left users craving the interactions that once made the Web fun. Easter eggs have all but disappeared, replaced by innumerable greyscale box hierarchies. This imperative was set by Big Tech, like Apple, to elevate the brand.
Before minimalism, skeuomorphism was the reigning design approach.
Skeuomorphism is design that imitates familiar, existing objects. In a previous publication, we highlighted how skeuomorphism informed the early iPhone Notes app. Before some iteration of the stark white Notes app that arrived after iOS 7, the yellow legal pad-style interface in the early days conveyed familiarity in the face of a drastically new product; it signaled to users through design its function.
This approach serves a real purpose. Skeuomorphism’s beauty lies in its simple unification of UX (function) and UI (aesthetics)— in making a new concept more intelligible.
Function-Design
Sir Jony Ives is one of Tech’s Original Thought Leaders. Collaborating at the highest levels with Steve Jobs, Ives served as the Chief Design Officer at Apple; he was pivotal in the design of the iMac, iPod, iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, AirPods.
Evoking black-and white-dualism, Ives is always clad in lighter shades of athleisure than his predecessors, and in juxtaposition, his performance feels less staged when placed next to other Tech giants. He opts to be seated, instead of towering over us on stage, spending his time future-building, and breaking down the silos between truth and necessity. This facade remains whole even when he takes the offense, while teasing his OpenAI collaboration.
His idiosyncrasies—how he fidgets, pregnant pauses, translating the pursuits of an artist, approximating the work to “servitude” make him feel like a person. Maybe better, he is emblematic of the good parts of a designer. He’s not a rote programmer, he is an Artist.
His answers mirror the design process. Amorphous, contextual, nuanced, approximations. He even falls into the trap of the designer: the desire to create selfishly, to bend tubes because no one has ever done so, but the need to listen to and ultimately serve the user, his allegiance manifesting through his desire to phase out screens.
Ives’s style and practice become indistinguishable. He is representative of some countercurrent emerging in tech, but perhaps the most high-profile case of such.
He tends to circle back to his roots and how indistinguishable his pursuit was from the principles that guided tech in the early days. Laden with optimism, values, creating a better world—a more fun world, more connected—tech offering opportunities. The Coppola family-directed (assumption) video introducing io conveyed a feeling of tech that had been lost. A world that some designers have never experienced. It’s tough to say how much of this optimism still permeates through streaks of Silicon Valley.
Function over Design
There is no denying the decreasing power of design; while always undervalued, the outwardly dark practices and Tech Founders’ allegiance to profit maximization and addiction have contributed to a sense of disempowerment and ennui. UX/UI researchers and designers, on the periphery of industry, also continue to experience devastatingly long bouts of unemployment, coming off the Year[s] of Efficiency.
For those outside of tech, the announcement went relatively unnoticed. There is a race to further transmute artificial intelligence (AI) into more usable and consumable forms, with the general public largely in standby. There are, of course, the Early Adopters: casual Large Language Model (LLM) engagers, but AI still seems speculative, with the Big Tech-user relationship being driven by angst and confusion. From a strategic standpoint, AI is a business, and marketing is better done through emotional manipulation in order to drive engagement—what better way than framing AI as “a robot coming for your way of life?”
This seems in line with the developments we have seen out of human-AI interaction and wearable AI, with companies like Humane largely operating outside of the zeitgeist. While this may have come down to the relative secrecy of the project, Humane was undoubtedly ambitious and had the potential to propel us emotionally back to 2007 Macworld.
Humane generated a tremendous amount of buzz in Tech with its Ai pin, but the pin underperformed in market. User feedback indicated that the pin was regressive. It did not give users the autonomy to disconnect, it cut off access. It was a product riddled by pain points: a separate cell phone number, an independent data plan only available through Humane, overheating, poor battery life. Aesthetically impractical and technically insufficient.
Ives is well-positioned to make a better product. AI is developing rapidly, but will it be fast enough? Users often cited that the pin provided incorrect responses.
The conversation between Ives and Altman feels disjointed, and there are discussions that it is AI-generated. Ives, bringing “the heart” to io, speaking to Altman’s care and responsibility. Altman, speaking to facts and efficiency as a driver for good.
Function with Design
2007 felt modernist—an empty, false idol sheathed in technological determinism. There is something to be said about the shattering of idealism as users become increasingly inundated with the bad of tech, further amplified through this “regressive form of neoliberalism” or “new form of capitalism.”
We return to Airbnb’s “skeuomorphic” icons. By definition, skeuomorphism is the unification of functionality and style, historically used for very new products, to convey to users a sense of familiarity and mediate user interactions. In short, it is function through style. Aside from style, why do we affix the attribute of “skeuomorphic” to these icons? Well-versed in the language and rituals of tech, these icons do not aid the user experience; therefore, they do not meet the definition of “skeuomorphism.” If the definition requires dual conveyance, could the icons mediate function (i.e. encouraging user interaction) by style (i.e. signaling “care,” “some sense of humanity through design?)” Is this skeuo-pastiche—ethic-less, but encouraging user interaction through simulating values?
When greeted with the hot air balloon that exudes orange from a burning blue “Explore” tab, by a Business that continues to stray from the hopes of tech, the look seems to deceive even designers.
As Ives postulates about the “spirituality” and “care” inherent to neatly packaging a wire to save someone time,1 he spends very little time articulating a deeper core set of values or ethics for designers. We acknowledge that we cannot escape the confines of capitalism, but we fear design that hides and obscures the beating heart that fuels these products—making the bad more palatable. Leading with aesthetics does not tacitly imply values.
The elevation of Ives’s position and potential magnitude of io’s work rightfully lent him to identify “that everything [he] have learned over the last 30 years has led [him] to this moment.”2 There is tremendous opportunity in this space to move UX and Product development beyond utilitarianism—further articulating what a logic of care can look like without simply painting a new coat on the bad. He hints at this need.
While he has all the experience, power, and opportunity for this work to take root, the relative nascency of AI with limited safeguards and the supreme ability of neoliberalism to absorb all in its path will present quite the challenge. He certainly has a captive audience, ready to once again follow suit, remodeling design systems after his own.
Cite this publication
APA
MIdST LABS. (2025, May 27). Skin-Deep Human-Centered Design. MIdST LABS. https://midstlabs.substack.com/skin-deep-human-centered-design
Chicago
MIdST LABS. "Skin-Deep Human-Centered Design." MIdST LABS, May 27, 2025. https://midstlabs.substack.com/skin-deep-human-centered-design
MLA
MIdST LABS. "Skin-Deep Human-Centered Design." MIdST LABS, 27 May 2025. https://midstlabs.substack.com/skin-deep-human-centered-design
Stripe. (2025, May 8). A conversation with Jony Ive [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/wLb9g_8r-mE.
OpenAI. (2025, May 21). Sam & Jony introduce io [Video]. YouTube. https://youtu.be/W09bIpc_3ms.
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