The page was skeuomorphism before we had a word for it. We called it realism, then flat design, then convinced ourselves we had moved on. We hadn't, the filing cabinet just stopped looking like wood.
The metaphor chosen at the time, rightly so, given that a computer wrote things and needed to let you save text and return to it later, was: page. Multiple pages aggregated? A folder. Multiple folders and pages aggregated and stored? An archive or library. Elegant.
But what if the information store, meant to let you work on something else and then return to your previous work by creating separate compartments, had chosen the metaphor of trees, as if content were information written into the veins of a leaf? An aggregate of leaves kept together is a branch. The equivalent of the library becomes a tree. That would have led, in turn, to a desktop more like the layout of a garden than what we have now.
Yes, metaphors influence how we perceive software, but they are not limited to that. This is harder to see in hindsight, since what was once the metaphor used to represent a new category has now become its definition: something we take for granted, as if it had been inevitable. Yet metaphors determine which evolutions of software seem natural and which seem unnatural.
The Vocabulary of the Page
The current document metaphor makes it almost inevitable to keep walking further down the road already taken, defining by inertia concepts such as: open, close, archive, copy, trash, browse, sort. All of it recalls document management.
But what if we had opted for the metaphor of the leaf? I'm not questioning the choice of the page, stay with me to grasp the point. The operations that would have emerged naturally (literally, lol) would be something like: grow, prune, graft, propagate, cultivate, observe relationships, follow paths.
Notice how tiring it is today to describe the saving of environments containing information without talking about archiving or files. I'll throw you a challenge: try to describe a file system without using words derived from document archiving. Normally we say: file, folder, directory, archive, library, document, trash, copy, move, path, explore. We don't even notice it anymore, but all of these come from the world of managing physical documents. The metaphor has become so dominant that it makes it hard to even imagine alternatives.
Now imagine explaining to someone who has never seen a computer what's happening behind the scenes, but using a biological metaphor instead.
From: "I saved the file in the Projects folder."
To: "I grew this leaf on the Projects branch."
From: "I copied the file."
To: "I propagated this leaf."
From: "I moved the folder."
To: "I transplanted this branch."
Sounds strange, right? Not because it's less correct. It sounds strange because for forty years we've been immersed in the archival metaphor.
File → Leaf
Folder → Branch
Directory → Tree
Library → Forest
Copy → Propagation
Move → Transplant
Delete → Pruning
Desktop → Garden layout
But the more interesting consequence, more than the vocabulary, is that we probably would have started thinking of information as growing organisms rather than archived documents, and of the desktop as real, proper terrain (an interesting line of thought, in the perspective of finding a paradigm that works transversally from 2D interfaces to spatial computing, but that's perhaps another reflection). It seems like a trivial detail, but language changes how you analyze a problem. Have we ever stopped to think how much of our current way of conceiving information comes from the nature of information itself, and how much comes from the metaphor chosen to represent it?
More Than Aesthetics
In essence, we're not just talking about a change of aesthetics. It's a decision that touches perceived affordances, the mental models it evokes, the operations that seem obvious, and the future evolutions that seem logical.
If software had adopted a biological metaphor instead of an archival one, would we have invented the same paradigms? Maybe yes, maybe no, but the question is intriguing. The metaphor may not determine evolution on its own, but it undeniably creates strong inertia toward certain directions and makes others less likely.
The fact that it's hard to describe information management without archival language doesn't necessarily prove the metaphor caused the architecture, or that any alternative would have worked equally well. It could also be that the document metaphor succeeded precisely because it described a structure that was already technically convenient.
So the honest version is not black and white. I'm not claiming the metaphor alone determines evolution. I'm asking: are we observing a property of the technology, or a metaphor that is crystallizing?
The Invisible Skeuomorph
It makes little sense in 2026 to argue about the choice made at the birth of computers. But this is the perfect moment, if not to determine then at least to question, the metaphor taking shape for AI agents and spatial computing.
If today we represent agents as chat, what kinds of evolution are we making natural? And which ones are we making nearly invisible?
Today it's difficult to talk about information management without using the language of archives. In ten years, it might be difficult to talk about AI without using the language of conversation, not because conversation is the only true form, but because we stopped seeing it as a metaphor at all.
Once we've seen that the desktop wasn't so inevitable after all, it was the right choice, but not because there were no alternatives, are we sure that chat is?