ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a critical response to some dominant themes in existing understandings of ‘the interface’. Past work on user interfaces has tended to uncritically perpetuate an idea that interfaces are self-contained features of technological devices, designed and built by technology companies. Reflecting the disciplinary backgrounds of key thinkers in the field, these self-contained interfaces are consistently theorised as a technology of representation, fitting into a framework of analysis already well established for investigating media technologies such as television and film. Furthermore, interfaces as representational technology are consistently evaluated in terms of a posited dichotomy between transparency and opacity, in which the transparent interface is treated as ideologically suspect in its hiding away of the design decisions that have gone into its creation and its claims to representational realism. In response, this chapter argues that user interfaces must be understood as dynamic and collaborative phenomena produced through the interaction of user and device, and this interaction has little to do with representation in the sense in which this word has been applied to past media technologies. Inasmuch as the user interface is a technology of representation, it seeks most importantly to represent the body of a user to a technological device in order to facilitate certain kinds of physical reciprocity. As a result, the transparency or opacity of the interface does not relate to an implicit claim to provide a perfect window on something beyond the interface, but rather the degree to which the user and device can function together without perceived effort or conscious planning. The chapter ends with a setting aside of the noun ‘the interface’ in favour of the verb ‘to interface’ as a way of highlighting the degree to which user interfaces must be understood as produced by ongoing, dynamic processes of engagement between bodies and objects rather than existing as fixed, discrete technological products.
