What Do We Mean by “Program”?
The Convergence of Architecture
and Interface Design
Benjamin H. Bratton
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
