Reading Response #5

to Artful Design • Chapter 5: “Interface Design” + Interlude “Dialogue with a Zen Master”

May-Ann “Gray” Wong

29 October 2023

Music 256A / CS476A, Stanford University

Reading Response: Complexity Through Simplicity

From this week's reading, I'd like to respond to Artful Design Principle 5.17, “Embody,” which states that “humans are embodied creatures; we operate more efficiently, satisfyingly when we ‘feel as one’ with the interface we are using” (238): Embodied interfaces allow us to focus about the things we’d want to do instead of how to control it. To me, from a very narrow viewpoint in the sphere only of design thinking, this definition strikes me as what intuitive design would be. But I also believe that intuitive design within design thinking is much more limited than what an embodied interface entails. The reason being is that I feel like a lot of design thinking, at least within the sphere of Stanford courses and the prototypes we make, is mostly digital-driven; anything “embodied” is basically ignored in favor of what is digitally intuitive, and instead of inventing new ways of interaction intimacy, we utilize existing digital interactions only. Of course, these are interactions that “feel as one” to us at the time, but only because we have for so long used that interaction to represent that action we want to do; it may not have actually been intuitive to us in the beginning or to those with low digital literacy. In other words, instead of drawing from the idea of “feeling as one” with the interface or design, I feel like we maybe unintentionally self-limit the scope of digital interfaces and interactions that we implement by reusing these existing patterns. Though, of course, at the same time, there lies the question of how users would feel with unfamiliar use cases for some interactions; when is it appropriate to “break the mold” with true embodied interface and when is it not?

Closely related to this concept of embodied interfaces is the idea of intimacy with interfaces, which is brought up specifically in the context of the lack of it between human player and instrument. I feel like with many things today and such established UI guidelines and libraries, any sense of intimacy with the digital is obsolete; there’s no more room for exploration and wonder (or maybe it’s that there are fewer apps that provoke such a feeling?), and so any sort of intimacy is scrubbed clean; it’s just sterile functionality without much thought for how we can feel connected to the app through emotions, haptics, fidelity, or any other senses. Nowadays, all apps look the same—it’s just the content that is different. And when all apps look the same, it’s hard to feel any sort of emotional connection or intimacy to it.