Interfaces: An Overview

It could be said that virtually everything we encounter as we make our way through our day-to-day life could be considered an interface of sorts.

This statement seems, on the face of it, to be so utterly facile and useless that the temptation is to dismiss it out of hand.  Of course interfaces surround us; you'd have to be practically comatose not to interact with the world around you.  That lede is so ignorant that I might have inadvertently made you slightly stupider just by reading it, and I apologize.

But that's kind of the point.  Everything we encounter is an interface, yes.  But not everything we encounter is a control interface.  My manipulation of the screen on my iPhone in order to send a text message to a friend is a control interface.  I'm directly controlling the outcome of the interaction between myself and the phone, and this is the sort of interface we mostly tend to think of when we consider the word.  My swearing in incoherent rage at the iPhone when it autocorrects "plastic" to "placid" for the seventh time is another sort of interface, and, generally speaking, a less productive one.

The fact that my iPhone looks and functions in a very similar fashion to every other cellphone on the market, however, is a very different sort of interface, as is the fact that the little icon on the button that I press to start and end the call looks like a telephone that hasn't been in general use for thirty years and that most cellphone owners have never even seen outside of a movie, or, for that matter, the button design itself, which is designed to evoke its mechanical ancestor.

Interface design both programs and is programmed by us.  We say that an easy-to-use interface is "intuitive," when in fact the "intuition" is years of programming passed down from previous technologies and ingrained usage.  I am currently typing this on a laptop computer that weighs about three pounds (about 1.4 kilos).  It is thinner than a pen when it is closed, and maintains a wireless connection to a worldwide network that provides me with research information at a moment's notice.
Yet I still enter text into this amazing device via a method derived from a mechanical invention over a hundred years old: the typewriter.  The keys on the computer are even arranged in the same manner as on my mother's old Brother portable machine, which used no electricity.  The QWERTY system was designed specifically to slow down professional typists, who could enter text so quickly that the metal slugs of type, each one on the end of its own little arm, would jam together.

We don't have handset telephones anymore. We don't need a button on a touchscreen.  We certainly don't need to keep the keys from jamming together on a MacBook Air.  Yet we are constantly using these interfaces, and thousands of others just like them, on a daily basis.

Not only that, we replicate the old experiences, expending time and effort on reverse-engineering objects with the verisimilitude of the obsolete.  I personally know people who insist on having "mechanical" keyboards for their computers, and who will pay extra for them.  Apple has created a haptic-touch feedback system for their watches and phones that duplicate the sensation of touching a mechanical button.  Some cars are so quiet and well-insulated now that their designers have created a function that plays back the sound of a car's motor back through the sound system.  And everyone has that friend who goes on about the superior sound qualities of vinyl.

Don't get me wrong.  Everyone has a right to the experiences they enjoy (within reason), and if enough people like something, the market will find a way to bring it to fruition.  Not every single change has to be adopted wholeheartedly and immediately.  That's not what this is all about.

What I hope to examine are the ways in which we operate and are in turn are operated by these interfaces, both great and small.  I want to look at interfaces at both ends of the scale, from the very small, such as typography and iconography, to the very large, such as architecture, and the very largest interface of all: religion.

This may have all been done before.  In fact, I know a lot of it has, because I'm certainly not smart enough to think it all up.  But, it hasn't been done by me.  Who knows?  I might accidentally discover something.