Jay David Bolter & Diane Gromala,
Windows and Mirrors: Interaction Design, Digital Art and the Myth of Transparency.
Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2003.
ISBN: 0 262 02545 0
208 pp
US$29.95 (hb)
(Review copy supplied by MIT Press)
The authors of this valuable book have a nice trick on page xi of their introduction. They give a list of some of the big name theorists everybody name checks in books about new media, and explain, “We choose not to discuss them because this is a book about craft”. I for one shall be advising some of my graduates to take up this fine example. They also provide a useful paragraph for critics on “what we are not saying”. I have tried to bear this handy device in what follows.
The metaphors of the mirror and the window have had quite a life of it. Jay Bolter, at one time a professor of Classics, is on home turf with perhaps the earliest of them all, Plato’s cave. Somewhat later, Alberti’s imagining of the eye as a window paved the way for perspective, realism, photography and the belief that rationality and numbers could provide us with a detailed and accurate map of the world. With designer and design historian Diane Gromala, Bolter seems to have used the occasion of curating SIGGRAPH 2000’s art gallery to explore some of continuing life in these metaphors, specifically in relation to digital design. Their theme throughout is that designers can and should, even must, learn from digital artists the potentialities of their craft.
Central to their argument is their belief that we have moved from interface to interaction. The pre-design command-line interface was phase one, superseded by the window-icon-menu-pointer graphical user interface or GUI. Now, however, we must confront, with the aid of the digital arts, a new and more humanistic era in digital design. Interaction, or “contextual design” as they refer to it, is characterised by its recognition that the digital world is not a world apart, not, in any case, anymore. Embedded, wearable, ubiquitous and wireless computing are not just new accessories: they indicate that the boundaries between cyberspace and IRL have dissolved. This is not at all to say that the digital has invaded the world: on the contrary, the world, the bodies and environments of users, have invaded cyberspace. Bodies and environments enclose computing just as much as computing embraces us.
If you haven’t already read Bolter and Grusin’s Remediation, you can pick up most of the arguments here. New media remediate old media. Each new medium – TV for example – starts out by adopting the content of old media: in television’s case sport, light entertainment, theatre, radio and film. The internet, of course, embodies the lot. This kind of Russian doll thesis is pleasantly rehearsed in the new book, but it isn’t the whole story. The periodisation of the development of computing design is new and welcome, if a little controversial. The authors begin with a face-off between the structuralism of Jakob Nielson (Designing Web Usability) and the design aesthetics of David Siegel (Creating Killer Websites). The structuralists (who include Tim Berners-Lee and Marc Andreesen) are caricatured as nerds whose passion for maths leads them to distrust design and prioritise information. The designers, on the other hand, want to provide experiences. Bells and whistles alone won’t do the trick, but judiciously used, they help immerse the user in the interface. The former represent the window thesis: the web as a transparent medium for distributing information. The latter are closer to the mirror effect: an environment that reflects the user back to themselves. The trick will be balancing the virtues of the two approaches.
The chapters that follow take, by and large, a single artwork from the SIGGRAPH gallery and derive lessons from it for the future of digital design. The descriptions are clear, the technical accounts sufficiently but not overwhelmingly detailed, and the evocations of their emotional and intellectual impacts comprehensible and alluring. From each work they derive a principle. Interfaces, they argue, can never be transparent, because they always frame our experience. Transparanecy is not the only option. Even the classic Macintosh desktop comes in for criticism (but not as much as the jolly attack on the incompetence of Microserf Windoze). Interface transparency all too often masks the underlying operations of the system, and makes it hard if not impossible to retrieve a file or to restore lost data. One of the benefits of digital arts is that they ask us to look directly at the surface, not through it. The authors recommend art that stops us at the screen, but also art that uses montage, bricolage and even the old transparency if it occurs in conjunction with a self-reflective (mirror) context that speaks directly to its transparency.
Like Vincent Mosco’s superb political-economy debunking of cyberspace myths The Digital Sublime, Bolter and Gromala rip up the old myths of John Perry Barlow and Marvin Minsky’s disembodied cyberspace. They look instead at biofeedback systems, virtual reality therapy, augmented reality, wearable computers that interact with their environments. In a sweep through the epochs of digital design, they characterise the first as Platonic design, where the real business took place in the abstract world of numbers. In the second phase, the HCI-design era, there was a move away from the conception of users as cognitive systems towards a sense that they had ergonomic requirements, and that workplaces already had a functioning layout, one that didn’t necessarily have to be changed to accommodate computers. Maybe the computers could fit the workplace. This is the emergence of contextual design, where the interaction responds to both the framing activities of the computer and the physical bodies and environments that interact with them.
The book undoubtedly does what it sets out to do: it makes a sound and persuasive case for what some of the missing theorists would describe as a phenomenological basis for design. Along the way they offer some fascinating insights into the history of computing design in the USA, and by omission point towards the task of doing similar work in other cultural contexts. It’s smart, it’s sassy, its readable, and it has good messages for hard and software designers as well as providing a reliable record of a major digital art show. I still feel like I want to control the display on my browser – set the typeface larger, or kill the pop-ups. But if there is going to be real interaction, we all need to learn to be designers, and this is a good place to start.
Sean Cubitt
University of Waikato, New Zealand.
Created on: Monday, 6 December 2004 | Last Updated: 30-Nov-04