ABSTRACT

This chapter looks at the precarious nature of the GUI to propose that the interface needs to be understood as more than the screen that has been so central to the disciplines and fields of Computer-Human-Interaction design and development. It seeks to disarticulate the idea of an interface by locating it in three different histories, narratives, and imaginations, drawing from Post-Colonial computing, Feminist epistemology of science and technology, and cybernetics studies to show how the Interface can be studied and decoded using different entry points and locations of access. It illustrates how to re-conceptualise the form, format, and function of the Interface outside of its quotidian touch-scroll-click-access transactional functionalities that the GUI is reduced to. It further examines how this separation of the Interface from the GUI – this transition to the No-UI – offers us new modes of understanding protocols of power and realms of regulation that are not easily addressed by the omniscient presence of the GUI.