—> link to slides
"By the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism—in short, cyborgs. The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics. The cyborg is a condensed image of both imagination and material reality, the two joined centers structuring any possibility of historical transformation. In the traditions of “Western” science and politics—the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of progress; the tradition of the appropriation of nature as resource for the productions of culture; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other—the relation between organism and machine has been a border war. The stakes in the border war have been the territories of production, reproduction, and imagination." —Donna Haraway, Cyborg Manifesto [3]
The interface is one of those borders at stakes in our imagination. As a step forward, Haraway argues "for pleasure in the confusion of boundaries and for responsibility in their construction" [3].
In this class, we take up Haraway's provocation to learn about the interface, and how we as interaction designers command and create at this zone of play and possibility.
In every waking moment, we are surrounded by our tools. Interfaces are the consequential bit of the tool -- the site of contact where our relationship with that tool is negotiated and shaped.
You might look at a screen, for example, and see the two dimensional glass as the interface. Or, look at the screen as a window, a door to content, experience, etc. Though to really understand what the interface is doing, we must expand beyond the screen itself. Interactions with the glass has consequences, is transformative of both user and world. In this sense, the interface is an effect, process, relationship.
Hookway describes the interface as a relationship "rather than as a technology in itself" [1]. The relationship is a "boundary condition that is at the same time encountered and worked through toward some specific end" [1].
What does it mean for the interface to be a boundary object? Hookway says, "it describes the site or moment in which the full operation and apparatus of systems, networks, hierarchies, and material flows are distilled into concrete action" [1]. We click buy on the Amazon mobile website, the logics of capital and global resource extraction whir into motion.
Reinforcing this view, Galloway writes: "Interfaces themselves are effects, in that they bring about transformations in material states" [2]. They are a "fertile nexus" that is always a process, a dirty translation [2].
Interface is more than screen or doorknob, it is the consequences of the tapping or turning of the knob too. But even deeper, Haraway's insistence that the relationship is a battleground in the face of global destruction and oppression rings deeply when you think of interfaces both as thing and effect. Interfaces are those zones which put our bodies into contact and play with machines, and thus, those systems. They are the center of battle, play and imagination.
The interface goes beyond just immediate effect. That relationship shapes everyday life, and of course, the pasts and futures available to us. Myth is one way to think about that relationship.
In the Cyborg Manifesto, Haraway writes: "The boundary is permeable be tween tool and myth, instrument and concept, historical systems of social relations and historical anatomies of possible bodies, including objects of knowledge. Indeed, myth and tool mutually constitute each other."
We shape tool, tool shapes us.