What Do We Mean by “Program”?
Yahoo!, SCI_Arc, UCLA | benjamin@bratton.info
May + June 2008
interactions
Very often in my discussions with interaction designers, there is strong agreement that their work should include in its assignment a broader range of interactions, including things like supply-chain systems, recycling techniques, intangible workflow processes, traffic interfaces, and even furniture. There is a hope that their discipline would have something important to say (and do) for the design of interaction wherever it may meaningfully occur. There is, however, less insight than enthusiasm into how other design disciplines have thought about these issues, and therefore where closer bonds are most needed. If interaction design is to make good on its aspiration to move beyond the relatively closed, localized experience of clickable software buttons and expand into the more open, expansive agenda of how human-scale and city-scale interactions can be designed, then it will do well to consider how architecture relates to human-machine interaction (as body and building) and what might be learned from it.
Design is not only the design of things in themselves but perhaps more important the design of how things work together (something more complex and
elusive). Architecture refers to this working together as “program”—a set of designed or designable scripts that organize organization itself, that imagine in advance how things will play out, and stage their interrelations accordingly. It seems that the word and the concept have a vital and specific role in enabling the necessary scalar shifts to which interaction design aspires, one which is not only about the convergences of interfaces (and disciplines) but also their replications and divergences.
Embedded Interfaces: Software and Space To investigate what organi-zation-of-organization really means, we have to first specify what it is that programs program, namely “interfaces.” If we think of interface design as an expertise in the points of contact between complex and perhaps incompatible systems, the design of interfaces has everything and nothing to do with software or architecture per se, as both systems are themselves organizations of interfaces programmed in particular ways. We study and produce interfaces between humans and computers but understand that the chain of interactive succession extends far beyond the moment when
buttons on screens are clicked. It extends all the way down into global and local networks of systemic interconnectivity, including and dependent upon concrete, tangibly embedded interfaces like buildings, cables, and cities. Conversely, once we think about how and why phy-scial things are moving as they are through urban space, we discover the software under the surfaces of everyday hardwares. Each couches the other.
I hope to clarify—particularly for interaction designers who specialize in the creation of software graphical user interfaces—a necessary convergence between these two nominally distinct design practices, architecture and interaction design, and to sketch an image for programmatic thinking that is more encompassing than has been previously considered. My hope is that as points of contact between complex systems are necessarily both physical and virtual, and as each creeps further into the domain of the other, a combined agenda of architecture and interaction design will emerge called perhaps simply “interface design.” I would hope that this emergent discipline will be widely understood not only as a design craft but also as having significant
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