Interface Culture – Infinity Imagined

Conclusion of Steven Johnson’s Interface Culture:

“As a product of engineering, interface design necessarily works in the interest of clarity and coherence, but once its practitioners begin to think of themselves as artists, those values grow more and more restrictive.”

“At the treshold points near the birt of new technology, all types of distortions and misunderstandings are bound to appear – misunderstandings not only of how the machines actually work but also more subtle matters: what realm of experience the new technologies belong to, what values they perpertuate, where their more indirect effects will take place”.

“What, then are the blind spots of our own age? We have already encountered a few: he tyranny of image over text, the limitations of the desktop metaphor; the potential chaos of intelligent agents. But there is a more fundamental – and for that reason more difficult to perceive – blind spot in the high-tech imagination, and it has to do with the general region of experience that the interface is felt to occupy”.

“[...] we’re reminded dozen times each day that the digital revolution will change everything, and yet when we probe deeper to find out what exactly will change under this new regime, all we get are banal reveries of sending faxes from the beach.”

“The most profound change ushered in by the digital revolution will not involve bells and whistles or new programming tricks. It will not come in the form of a 3-D web browser or voice recognition or artificial intelligence. The most profound change will lie with our generic expectations about the interface itself. We will come to think of interface design as a kind of art form – perhaps the art form of the next century.”

“Every major technological age attracts a certain dominant artistic form: the mathematical and optical innovations of the Rennaissance were best realized in the geometry of perspective painting; the industrial age worked through its social crises in the triple-decker novel. This digital are belongs to the graphic interface, and it is time for us to recognize the imaginative work that went into that creation, and prepare ourselves for the imaginative breakthroughs to come. Information-space is the great symbolic accomplishment of our era. We will spend the next few decades coming to terms with it.”

“The problem with the interface medium at present – and this one reason that we have trouble taking it seriously as a medium – is that we don’t have a language like this to describe it. For the most part, our evaluative criteria reduce to the bottom-dollar question: is it easy to use or not? There’s invariably a bonus round for the cyber-slackers – is it cool? – but that’s usually where the critique comes to a grinding halt.”

“The lack of control wasn’t perceived as a drawback because the whole point of the game – what made it such a phenomenal success – lay in the sheer exhilaration of moving, and moving fast.” [...] “The game was finally all about the rush and the intensity of moving through digital space; you didn’t need puzzles or plotlines for that.” [...] “The space was what mattered. Everything else was incidental.”

“Interestingly, it turns out to be harder to represent communities using the tools of the modern graphic interface.”

“The irony is that to this day, some of the most engaged and elaborate virtual communities on the planet rely on text-driven interfaces that wouldn’t have looked out of place in the seventies. This can be taken as yet another sign that the power of text is underestimated by today’s reigning design orthodoxy, but it should aslo be seen as a call to arms for the next generation of interface designers, a genuine problem in search of solution.”

Mainstream versus the avant-garde: small pockets of designers working in opposition to the mainstream. The two wold of subculture and mainstream have existed ever since in an uneasy, but generative relationship: the avant-garde’s flair for novelty prodding the dominant culture’s more conservative incliniations, a system of checks and balances that is by now so commonplace that we can barely imagine an alternative.”

“But the real revolution unleashed by HTML my well be the democratization of the interface design.”

“It is the nature of any avant-garde to mess with our expecations, to keep us guessing, and for the most part, we’ve grown comfortable – even jaded – with this endless cycle of envelope pushing. No culture in history has so readily assimilated its avant-garde movements”.

“[...] the subculture spins out the innovations, and the dominant culture appropriates the forms it thinks it can market to a mass audience. But the transition is not likely to be smooth one.”

“No medium has managed to reach the status of genuine artistry without offending some of its audience some of the time. Even under the user-friendly dictates of interface design, you can’t make art without a good measure of alienation.”

“One easy way to buld a consistent user interface is to follow the codes and conventions of the real world”.

“Data-smog”: for things that divert our attention for the real issues

“[...] the interface serves largely as a corrective to the forces unleashed by the information.”

“Cathedral, remember; were “infinity imagined” the heavens brought down to earthly scale. The mediaval mind couldn’t take in the full infinity of godliness, but it could subjugate itself before the majestic spires of Chartes or Saint-Sulpice. The interface offers a comparable sidelong view onto the infosphere, half unveiling and half disapearing act.”