organizations and systems. Both are critically concerned with solutions that provide continuity and structure on the one hand and fluidity and iteration on the other. Both aspire to model these for spatially embedded interfaces, mobile interfaces on the go, for one-way information, two-way communication, for search and location. Both are projective in their purpose: Both imagine an organization performing differently, as a different organism, and both install hard and soft structures to bring that about.
May + June 2008
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interactions
This is rudimentary information architectural theory, or should be. Again, “program” is the image of how interfaces, of whatever kind, come together into a real or potential active system of transference and communication. As a design venture, program is projective, even speculative. What will happen with the introduction or removal of some thing or process? What will happen to organizational translation? What is replaced or displaced in this? What intervention is at work in habit and habitat? This may begin as an analytical process, full of persona and testing, but no amount of research will add up to an irreducibly risky act of projection, to a simple act of design.
This is where software “becoming” architecture means not only software becoming a kind of environmental intelligence, but also that the conceptual design of software becomes, like the architectural imaginary, a discourse for the projective conception of what our shared environment could be and should be. This is clearly already
at work and is to be encouraged as such. But for its part, software design is still underestimated as tactical, as a technique of management rather than management itself. It is not merely solving a particular problem, any more than a building is merely solving a problem of space. Both are strategic, projective, and innovative.
But software, strange as it may sound, perhaps has still to clarify the horizon programs available to it. The politics of FL/ OSS is critically important as a model for democratic infrastructure, but it is limited as a politics of code and code developers. Privacy is important, encryption tools are important, open bandwidth is important, access for the disadvantaged is important, but these are more definitions of a level playing field than designs on what beautiful things might happen on that field. As software comes to animate space directly, a more universal interface design is necessary (and to great extent this is how I characterize my work to people confused as to why a sociologist is so concerned with architecture and software in the same breath).
Part of the development of more ambitious and omnivorous programs for interface design is to extend the specification of what hard and soft programs actually do, to draw the design profile of software not by its size or its application purpose, or its place within a stack, but according to its situation within a larger organizational habitus. What does it—as a complex of interfaces—converge, replicate, diverge, and when, and how does it do this? Are those results
transferable to other contexts, or not? Why not?
I end with an assignment for the reader: Design a political border. We know that it is an interface between two complex systems. But how big or small, strategic or tactical is the interface-design assignment there? It is an architectural assignment (as a recent New York Times competition demonstrated), but it is also a software design problem. Maybe it’s just a matter of smoother logistics of the same basic processes, or maybe the possibility is much more open than that. Next week some young visionary interface designer, not knowing that hard and soft systems are supposed to be dealt with by different professionals, may posit that geographic borders—lines in a planometric vision of terra firma implying contiguity where there is none—are incompatible with her program for how politics, cartography, and security should be constructed. When she does I will be listening carefully.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR Benjamin H. Bratton is a sociologist based in Los Angeles who specializes in design economies, media theory, architectural theory, and software studies. He is director of the Yahoo! Advanced Strategies Group, where he develops next-generation search, brand, and interaction platforms. He is also the senior cultural studies faculty at SCI_Arc (The Southern California Institute of Architecture), lecturer in the Department of Design|Media Arts at UCLA, where he co-directs the Brand Lab, and a founding fellow at the CALIT2 Center for Software Studies at U.C. San Diego. Visit him at www.bratton.info.
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